A taxonomy framework for unsupervised outlier detection techniques for multi-type data sets

The term "outlier" can generally be defined as an observation that is significantly different from the other values in a data set. The outliers may be instances of error or indicate events. The task of outlier detection aims at identifying such outliers in order to improve the analysis of data and further discover interesting and useful knowledge about unusual events within numerous applications domains. In this paper, we report on contemporary unsupervised outlier detection techniques for multiple types of data sets and provide a comprehensive taxonomy framework and two decision trees to select the most suitable technique based on data set. Furthermore, we highlight the advantages, disadvantages and performance issues of each class of outlier detection techniques under this taxonomy framework

Automatic Hyperparameter Tuning Method for Local Outlier Factor, with Applications to Anomaly Detection

In recent years, there have been many practical applications of anomaly detection such as in predictive maintenance, detection of credit fraud, network intrusion, and system failure. The goal of anomaly detection is to identify in the test data anomalous behaviors that are either rare or unseen in the training data. This is a common goal in predictive maintenance, which aims to forecast the imminent faults of an appliance given abundant samples of normal behaviors. Local outlier factor (LOF) is one of the state-of-the-art models used for anomaly detection, but the predictive performance of LOF depends greatly on the selection of hyperparameters. In this paper, we propose a novel, heuristic methodology to tune the hyperparameters in LOF. A tuned LOF model that uses the proposed method shows good predictive performance in both simulations and real data sets.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figure

APHRODITE: an Anomaly-based Architecture for False Positive Reduction

We present APHRODITE, an architecture designed to reduce false positives in network intrusion detection systems. APHRODITE works by detecting anomalies in the output traffic, and by correlating them with the alerts raised by the NIDS working on the input traffic. Benchmarks show a substantial reduction of false positives and that APHRODITE is effective also after a "quick setup", i.e. in the realistic case in which it has not been "trained" and set up optimall