  An active inference problem of detecting anomalies among heterogeneous
processes is considered. At each time, a subset of processes can be probed. The
objective is to design a sequential probing strategy that dynamically
determines which processes to observe at each time and when to terminate the
search so that the expected detection time is minimized under a constraint on
the probability of misclassifying any process. This problem falls into the
general setting of sequential design of experiments pioneered by Chernoff in
1959, in which a randomized strategy, referred to as the Chernoff test, was
proposed and shown to be asymptotically optimal as the error probability
approaches zero. For the problem considered in this paper, a low-complexity
deterministic test is shown to enjoy the same asymptotic optimality while
offering significantly better performance in the finite regime and faster
convergence to the optimal rate function, especially when the number of
processes is large. The computational complexity of the proposed test is also
of a significantly lower order.
