13,765 research outputs found
Outlier Mining Methods Based on Graph Structure Analysis
Outlier detection in high-dimensional datasets is a fundamental and challenging problem across disciplines that has also practical implications, as removing outliers from the training set improves the performance of machine learning algorithms. While many outlier mining algorithms have been proposed in the literature, they tend to be valid or efficient for specific types of datasets (time series, images, videos, etc.). Here we propose two methods that can be applied to generic datasets, as long as there is a meaningful measure of distance between pairs of elements of the dataset. Both methods start by defining a graph, where the nodes are the elements of the dataset, and the links have associated weights that are the distances between the nodes. Then, the first method assigns an outlier score based on the percolation (i.e., the fragmentation) of the graph. The second method uses the popular IsoMap non-linear dimensionality reduction algorithm, and assigns an outlier score by comparing the geodesic distances with the distances in the reduced space. We test these algorithms on real and synthetic datasets and show that they either outperform, or perform on par with other popular outlier detection methods. A main advantage of the percolation method is that is parameter free and therefore, it does not require any training; on the other hand, the IsoMap method has two integer number parameters, and when they are appropriately selected, the method performs similar to or better than all the other methods tested.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
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
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