Unsupervised outlier detection, which predicts if a test sample is an outlier or not using only the information from unlabelled inlier data, is an important but challenging task. Recently, methods based on the two-stage framework achieve state-of-the-art performance on this task. The framework leverages self-supervised representation learning algorithms to train a feature extractor on inlier data, and applies a simple outlier detector in the feature space. In this paper, we explore the possibility of avoiding the high cost of training a distinct representation for each outlier detection task, and instead using a single pre-trained network as the universal feature extractor regardless of the source of in-domain data. In particular, we replace the task-specific feature extractor by one network pre-trained on ImageNet with a self-supervised loss. In experiments, we demonstrate competitive or better performance on a variety of outlier detection benchmarks compared with previous two-stage methods, suggesting that learning representations from in-domain data may be unnecessary for outlier detection.
Brandeis University（布兰迪斯大学）；Michtom School of Computer Science（米奇托姆计算机科学学院）
In this paper, we focus on the fairness issues regarding unsupervised outlier detection. Traditional algorithms, without a specific design for algorithmic fairness, could implicitly encode and propagate statistical bias in data and raise societal concerns. To correct such unfairness and deliver a fair set of potential outlier candidates, we propose Deep Clustering based Fair Outlier Detection (DCFOD) that learns a good representation for utility maximization while enforcing the learnable representation to be subgroup-invariant on the sensitive attribute. Considering the coupled and reciprocal …
Randomized PCA Forest for Unsupervised Outlier Detection
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science（数学与计算机科学系）；University of Southern Denmark（南丹麦大学）；Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences（信息科技与通信科学学院）；Tampere University（塔尔库大学）
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；PricewaterhouseCoopers（普华永道）
A new semi-supervised ensemble algorithm called XGBOD (Extreme Gradient Boosting Outlier Detection) is proposed, described and demonstrated for the enhanced detection of outliers from normal observations in various practical datasets. The proposed framework combines the strengths of both supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods by creating a hybrid approach that exploits each of their individual performance capabilities in outlier detection. XGBOD uses multiple unsupervised outlier mining algorithms to extract useful representations from the underlying data that augment the predict…
Canadian University Dubai（迪拜加拿大大学）；UAE University（阿联酋大学）
High-dimensional data poses unique challenges in outlier detection process. Most of the existing algorithms fail to properly address the issues stemming from a large number of features. In particular, outlier detection algorithms perform poorly on data set of small size with a large number of features. In this paper, we propose a novel outlier detection algorithm based on principal component analysis and kernel density estimation. The proposed method is designed to address the challenges of dealing with high-dimensional data by projecting the original data onto a smaller space and using the in…
The idea of Innovation Search was proposed as a data clustering method in which the directions of innovation were utilized to compute the adjacency matrix and it was shown that Innovation Pursuit can notably outperform the self representation based subspace clustering methods. In this paper, we present a new discovery that the directions of innovation can be used to design a provable and strong robust (to outlier) PCA method. The proposed approach, dubbed iSearch, uses the direction search optimization problem to compute an optimal direction corresponding to each data point. iSearch utilizes t…
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院）
Deep networks often make confident, yet, incorrect, predictions when tested with outlier data that is far removed from their training distributions. Likelihoods computed by deep generative models (DGMs) are a candidate metric for outlier detection with unlabeled data. Yet, previous studies have shown that DGM likelihoods are unreliable and can be easily biased by simple transformations to input data. Here, we examine outlier detection with variational autoencoders (VAEs), among the simplest of DGMs. We propose novel analytical and algorithmic approaches to ameliorate key biases with VAE likeli…
Outlier detection is an important topic in machine learning and has been used in a wide range of applications. Outliers are objects that are few in number and deviate from the majority of objects. As a result of these two properties, we show that outliers are susceptible to a mechanism called fluctuation. This article proposes a method called fluctuation-based outlier detection (FBOD) that achieves a low linear time complexity and detects outliers purely based on the concept of fluctuation without employing any distance, density or isolation measure. Fundamentally different from all existing m…
Current top performing Pascal VOC object detectors employ detection proposals to guide the search for objects thereby avoiding exhaustive sliding window search across images. Despite the popularity of detection proposals, it is unclear which trade-offs are made when using them during object detection. We provide an in depth analysis of ten object proposal methods along with four baselines regarding ground truth annotation recall (on Pascal VOC 2007 and ImageNet 2013), repeatability, and impact on DPM detector performance. Our findings show common weaknesses of existing methods, and provide ins…
Outlier Detection is a critical and cardinal research task due its array of applications in variety of domains ranging from data mining, clustering, statistical analysis, fraud detection, network intrusion detection and diagnosis of diseases etc. Over the last few decades, distance-based outlier detection algorithms have gained significant reputation as a viable alternative to the more traditional statistical approaches due to their scalable, non-parametric and simple implementation. In this paper, we present a modified onion peeling (Convex hull) genetic algorithm to detect outliers in a Gaus…
Outliers are the points which are different from or inconsistent with the rest of the data. They can be novel, new, abnormal, unusual or noisy information. Outliers are sometimes more interesting than the majority of the data. The main challenges of outlier detection with the increasing complexity, size and variety of datasets, are how to catch similar outliers as a group, and how to evaluate the outliers. This paper describes an approach which uses Univariate outlier detection as a pre-processing step to detect the outlier and then applies K-means algorithm hence to analyse the effects of the…
Outlier detection is one of the most important processes taken to create good, reliable data in machine learning. The most methods of outlier detection leverage an auxiliary reconstruction task by assuming that outliers are more difficult to be recovered than normal samples (inliers). However, it is not always true, especially for auto-encoder (AE) based models. They may recover certain outliers even outliers are not in the training data, because they do not constrain the feature learning. Instead, we think outlier detection can be done in the feature space by measuring the feature distance be…
College of Engineering and Informatics, National University of Ireland, Galway（爱尔兰国立大学戈尔韦工程与信息学院）
Multi-class classification algorithms are very widely used, but we argue that they are not always ideal from a theoretical perspective, because they assume all classes are characterized by the data, whereas in many applications, training data for some classes may be entirely absent, rare, or statistically unrepresentative. We evaluate one-sided classifiers as an alternative, since they assume that only one class (the target) is well characterized. We consider a task of identifying whether a substance contains a chlorinated solvent, based on its chemical spectrum. For this application, it is no…
Mohammed V-Agdal University（穆罕默德五世阿格达尔大学）；Hassan II Mohammedia University（哈桑二世穆罕默迪亚大学）
This paper presents a new approach for detecting outliers by introducing the notion of object's proximity. The main idea is that normal point has similar characteristics with several neighbors. So the point in not an outlier if it has a high degree of proximity and its neighbors are several. The performance of this approach is illustrated through real datasets
Multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) plays a central role in data-exploration, dimensionality reduction and visualization. State-of-the-art MDS algorithms are not robust to outliers, yielding significant errors in the embedding even when only a handful of outliers are present. In this paper, we introduce a technique to detect and filter outliers based on geometric reasoning. We test the validity of triangles formed by three points, and mark a triangle as broken if its triangle inequality does not hold. The premise of our work is that unlike inliers, outlier distances tend to break many triangles. O…
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）
Local feature matching is a critical component of many computer vision pipelines, including among others Structure-from-Motion, SLAM, and Visual Localization. However, due to limitations in the descriptors, raw matches are often contaminated by a majority of outliers. As a result, outlier detection is a fundamental problem in computer vision, and a wide range of approaches have been proposed over the last decades. In this paper we revisit handcrafted approaches to outlier filtering. Based on best practices, we propose a hierarchical pipeline for effective outlier detection as well as integrate…
Rethinking Unsupervised Outlier Detection via Multiple Thresholding
Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；Westlake University（西湖大学）；Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited（宁德时代新能源科技股份有限公司）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
Many computer vision tasks involve processing large amounts of data contaminated by outliers, which need to be detected and rejected. While outlier detection methods based on robust statistics have existed for decades, only recently have methods based on sparse and low-rank representation been developed along with guarantees of correct outlier detection when the inliers lie in one or more low-dimensional subspaces. This paper proposes a new outlier detection method that combines tools from sparse representation with random walks on a graph. By exploiting the property that data points can be ex…
University of California, Berkeley（加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校）；University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）；Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学）
It is important to detect anomalous inputs when deploying machine learning systems. The use of larger and more complex inputs in deep learning magnifies the difficulty of distinguishing between anomalous and in-distribution examples. At the same time, diverse image and text data are available in enormous quantities. We propose leveraging these data to improve deep anomaly detection by training anomaly detectors against an auxiliary dataset of outliers, an approach we call Outlier Exposure (OE). This enables anomaly detectors to generalize and detect unseen anomalies. In extensive experiments o…
In this work, we address the following matrix recovery problem: suppose we are given a set of data points containing two parts, one part consists of samples drawn from a union of multiple subspaces and the other part consists of outliers. We do not know which data points are outliers, or how many outliers there are. The rank and number of the subspaces are unknown either. Can we detect the outliers and segment the samples into their right subspaces, efficiently and exactly? We utilize a so-called {\em Low-Rank Representation} (LRR) method to solve this problem, and prove that under mild techni…
University of Iowa（爱荷华大学）；University of Texas, Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
This paper considers the problem of recovering signals from compressed measurements contaminated with sparse outliers, which has arisen in many applications. In this paper, we propose a generative model neural network approach for reconstructing the ground truth signals under sparse outliers. We propose an iterative alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm for solving the outlier detection problem via $\ell_1$ norm minimization, and a gradient descent algorithm for solving the outlier detection problem via squared $\ell_1$ norm minimization. We establish the recovery guaran…
