  When sufficient labeled data are available, classical criteria based on
Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) or Precision-Recall (PR) curves can be
used to compare the performance of un-supervised anomaly detection algorithms.
However , in many situations, few or no data are labeled. This calls for
alternative criteria one can compute on non-labeled data. In this paper, two
criteria that do not require labels are empirically shown to discriminate
accurately (w.r.t. ROC or PR based criteria) between algorithms. These criteria
are based on existing Excess-Mass (EM) and Mass-Volume (MV) curves, which
generally cannot be well estimated in large dimension. A methodology based on
feature sub-sampling and aggregating is also described and tested, extending
the use of these criteria to high-dimensional datasets and solving major
drawbacks inherent to standard EM and MV curves.
