Detecting Outliers in Data with Correlated Measures

Advances in sensor technology have enabled the collection of large-scale datasets. Such datasets can be extremely noisy and often contain a significant amount of outliers that result from sensor malfunction or human operation faults. In order to utilize such data for real-world applications, it is critical to detect outliers so that models built from these datasets will not be skewed by outliers. In this paper, we propose a new outlier detection method that utilizes the correlations in the data (e.g., taxi trip distance vs. trip time). Different from existing outlier detection methods, we build a robust regression model that explicitly models the outliers and detects outliers simultaneously with the model fitting. We validate our approach on real-world datasets against methods specifically designed for each dataset as well as the state of the art outlier detectors. Our outlier detection method achieves better performances, demonstrating the robustness and generality of our method. Last, we report interesting case studies on some outliers that result from atypical events.Comment: 10 page

Robot Navigation in Unseen Spaces using an Abstract Map

Human navigation in built environments depends on symbolic spatial information which has unrealised potential to enhance robot navigation capabilities. Information sources such as labels, signs, maps, planners, spoken directions, and navigational gestures communicate a wealth of spatial information to the navigators of built environments; a wealth of information that robots typically ignore. We present a robot navigation system that uses the same symbolic spatial information employed by humans to purposefully navigate in unseen built environments with a level of performance comparable to humans. The navigation system uses a novel data structure called the abstract map to imagine malleable spatial models for unseen spaces from spatial symbols. Sensorimotor perceptions from a robot are then employed to provide purposeful navigation to symbolic goal locations in the unseen environment. We show how a dynamic system can be used to create malleable spatial models for the abstract map, and provide an open source implementation to encourage future work in the area of symbolic navigation. Symbolic navigation performance of humans and a robot is evaluated in a real-world built environment. The paper concludes with a qualitative analysis of human navigation strategies, providing further insights into how the symbolic navigation capabilities of robots in unseen built environments can be improved in the future.Comment: 15 pages, published in IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (http://doi.org/10.1109/TCDS.2020.2993855), see https://btalb.github.io/abstract_map/ for access to softwar

Certainty of outlier and boundary points processing in data mining

Data certainty is one of the issues in the real-world applications which is caused by unwanted noise in data. Recently, more attentions have been paid to overcome this problem. We proposed a new method based on neutrosophic set (NS) theory to detect boundary and outlier points as challenging points in clustering methods. Generally, firstly, a certainty value is assigned to data points based on the proposed definition in NS. Then, certainty set is presented for the proposed cost function in NS domain by considering a set of main clusters and noise cluster. After that, the proposed cost function is minimized by gradient descent method. Data points are clustered based on their membership degrees. Outlier points are assigned to noise cluster and boundary points are assigned to main clusters with almost same membership degrees. To show the effectiveness of the proposed method, two types of datasets including 3 datasets in Scatter type and 4 datasets in UCI type are used. Results demonstrate that the proposed cost function handles boundary and outlier points with more accurate membership degrees and outperforms existing state of the art clustering methods.Comment: Conference Paper, 6 page