Discriminating Self from Non-Self with Finite Mixtures of Multivariate Bernoulli Distributions

Affinity functions are the core components in negative selection to discriminate self from non-self. It has been shown that affinity functions such as the r-contiguous distance and the Hamming distance are limited applicable for discrimination problems such as anomaly detection. We propose to model self as a discrete probability distribution specified by finite mixtures of multivariate Bernoulli distributions. As by-product one also obtains information of non-self and hence is able to discriminate with probabilities self from non-self. We underpin our proposal with a comparative study between the two affinity functions and the probabilistic discrimination.