Drunk driving poses a significant threat to road safety, necessitating effective detection methods to enhance preventive measures and ensure the well-being of road users. Recognizing the critical importance of identifying drunk driving incidents for public safety, this paper introduces an effective semi-supervised anomaly detection strategy. The proposed strategy integrates three key elements: Independent Component Analysis (ICA), Kantorovitch distance (KD), and double Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (DEWMA). ICA is used to handle non-gaussian and multivariate data, while KD is used to measure the dissimilarity between normal and abnormal events based on ICA features. The DEWMA is applied to KD charting statistics to detect changes in data and uses a nonparametric threshold to improve sensitivity. The primary advantage of this approach is its ability to perform anomaly detection without requiring labeled data. The study also used XGBoost for the later calculation of the SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) values to identify the most important variables for detecting drunk driving behavior. The approach was evaluated using publicly available data from gas and temperature sensors, as well as digital cameras. The results showed that the proposed approach achieved an F1-score of 98% in detecting the driver’s drunk status, outperforming conventional PCA-based and ICA-based methods.