Unsupervised Class Separation of Multivariate Data through Cumulative Variance-based Ranking

• Main Authors: Andrew Foss, Osmar R. Zaïane, Sandra Zilles
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Orca
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.231.3872; http://www2.cs.uregina.ca/%7Ezilles/fossZZ09.pdf

Abstract—This paper introduces a new extension of outlier detection approaches and a new concept, class separation through variance. We show that accumulating information about the outlierness of points in multiple subspaces leads to a ranking in which classes with differing variance naturally tend to separate. Exploiting this leads to a highly effective and efficient unsupervised class separation approach, especially useful in the difficult case of heavily overlapping distributions. Unlike typical outlier detection algorithms, this method can be applied beyond the ‘rare classes ’ case with great success. Two novel algorithms that implement this approach are provided. Additionally, experiments show that the novel methods typically outperform other state-of-the-art outlier detection methods on high dimensional data such as Feature Bagging, SOE1, LOF, ORCA and Robust Mahalanobis Distance and competes even with the leading supervised classification methods. Keywords-Outlier Detection; Classification; Subspaces. I.