Randomizing Ensemble-based approaches for Outlier

The data size is increasing dramatically every day, therefore, it has emerged the need of detecting abnormal behaviors, which can harm seriously our systems. Outlier detection refers to the process of identifying outlying activities, which diverge from the remaining group of data. This process, an integral part of data mining field, has experienced recently a substantial interest from the data mining community. An outlying activity or an outlier refers to a data point, which significantly deviates and appears to be inconsistent compared to other data members. Ensemble-based outlier detection is a line of research employed in order to reduce the model dependence from datasets or data locality by raising the robustness of the data mining procedures. The key principle of an ensemble approach is using the combination of individual detection results, which do not contain the same list of outliers in order to come up with a consensus finding. In this paper, we propose a novel strategy of constructing randomized ensemble outlier detection. This approach is an extension of the heuristic greedy ensemble construction previously built by the research community. We will focus on the core components of constructing an ensemble –based algorithm for outlier detection. The randomization will be performed by intervening into the pseudo code of greedy ensemble and implementing randomization in the respective java code through the ELKI data-mining platform. The key purpose of our approach is to improve the greedy ensemble and to overcome its local maxima problem. In order to induce diversity, it is performed randomization by initializing the search with a random outlier detector from the pool of detectors. Finally, the paper provides strong insights regarding the ongoing work of our randomized ensemble-based approach for outlier detection. Empirical results indicate that due to inducing diversity by employing various outlier detection algorithms, the randomized ensemble approach performs better than using only one outlier detector

In-Network Outlier Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks

To address the problem of unsupervised outlier detection in wireless sensor networks, we develop an approach that (1) is flexible with respect to the outlier definition, (2) computes the result in-network to reduce both bandwidth and energy usage,(3) only uses single hop communication thus permitting very simple node failure detection and message reliability assurance mechanisms (e.g., carrier-sense), and (4) seamlessly accommodates dynamic updates to data. We examine performance using simulation with real sensor data streams. Our results demonstrate that our approach is accurate and imposes a reasonable communication load and level of power consumption.Comment: Extended version of a paper appearing in the Int'l Conference on Distributed Computing Systems 200

An Evaluation of Classification and Outlier Detection Algorithms

This paper evaluates algorithms for classification and outlier detection accuracies in temporal data. We focus on algorithms that train and classify rapidly and can be used for systems that need to incorporate new data regularly. Hence, we compare the accuracy of six fast algorithms using a range of well-known time-series datasets. The analyses demonstrate that the choice of algorithm is task and data specific but that we can derive heuristics for choosing. Gradient Boosting Machines are generally best for classification but there is no single winner for outlier detection though Gradient Boosting Machines (again) and Random Forest are better. Hence, we recommend running evaluations of a number of algorithms using our heuristics

A Semi-Supervised Feature Engineering Method for Effective Outlier Detection in Mixed Attribute Data Sets

Outlier detection is one of the crucial tasks in data mining which can lead to the finding of valuable and meaningful information within the data. An outlier is a data point that is notably dissimilar from other data points in the data set. As such, the methods for outlier detection play an important role in identifying and removing the outliers, thereby increasing the performance and accuracy of the prediction systems. Outlier detection is used in many areas like financial fraud detection, disease prediction, and network intrusion detection. Traditional outlier detection methods are founded on the use of different distance measures to estimate the similarity between the points and are confined to data sets that are purely continuous or categorical. These methods, though effective, lack in elucidating the relationship between outliers and known clusters/classes in the data set. We refer to this relationship as the context for any reported outlier. Alternate outlier detection methods establish the context of a reported outlier using underlying contextual beliefs of the data. Contextual beliefs are the established relationships between the attributes of the data set. Various studies have been recently conducted where they explore the contextual beliefs to determine outlier behavior. However, these methods do not scale in the situations where the data points and their respective contexts are sparse. Thus, the outliers reported by these methods tend to lose meaning. Another limitation of these methods is that they assume all features are equally important and do not consider nor determine subspaces among the features for identifying the outliers. Furthermore, determining subspaces is computationally exacerbated, as the number of possible subspaces increases with increasing dimensionality. This makes searching through all the possible subspaces impractical. In this thesis, we propose a Hybrid Bayesian Network approach to capture the underlying contextual beliefs to detect meaningful outliers in mixed attribute data sets. Hybrid Bayesian Networks utilize their probability distributions to encode the information of the data and outliers are those points which violate this information. To deal with the sparse contexts, we use an angle-based similarity method which is then combined with the joint probability distributions of the Hybrid Bayesian Network in a robust manner. With regards to the subspace selection, we employ a feature engineering method that consists of two-stage feature selection using Maximal Information Coefficient and Markov blankets of Hybrid Bayesian Networks to select highly correlated feature subspaces. This proposed method was tested on a real world medical record data set. The results indicate that the algorithm was able to identify meaningful outliers successfully. Moreover, we compare the performance of our algorithm with the existing baseline outlier detection algorithms. We also present a detailed analysis of the reported outliers using our method and demonstrate its efficiency when handling data points with sparse contexts

A survey of outlier detection methodologies

Outlier detection has been used for centuries to detect and, where appropriate, remove anomalous observations from data. Outliers arise due to mechanical faults, changes in system behaviour, fraudulent behaviour, human error, instrument error or simply through natural deviations in populations. Their detection can identify system faults and fraud before they escalate with potentially catastrophic consequences. It can identify errors and remove their contaminating effect on the data set and as such to purify the data for processing. The original outlier detection methods were arbitrary but now, principled and systematic techniques are used, drawn from the full gamut of Computer Science and Statistics. In this paper, we introduce a survey of contemporary techniques for outlier detection. We identify their respective motivations and distinguish their advantages and disadvantages in a comparative review