Detecting outliers using transduction and statistical testing

Outlier detection can uncover malicious behavior in fields like intrusion detection and fraud analysis. Although there has been a significant amount of work in outlier detection, most of the algorithms proposed in the literature are based on a particular definition of outliers (e.g., density-based), and use ad-hoc thresholds to detect them. In this paper we present a novel technique to detect outliers with respect to an existing clustering model. However, the test can also be successfully utilized to recognize outliers when the clustering information is not available. Our method is based on Transductive Confidence Machines, which have been previously proposed as a mechanism to provide individual confidence measures on classification decisions. The test uses hypothesis testing to prove or disprove whether a point is fit to be in each of the clusters of the model. We experimentally demonstrate that the test is highly robust, and produces very few misdiagnosed points, even when no clustering information is available. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate the robustness of our method under the circumstances of data contaminated by outliers. We finally show that our technique can be successfully applied to identify outliers in a noisy data set for which no information is available (e.g., ground truth, clustering structure, etc.). As such our proposed methodology is capable of bootstrapping from a noisy data set a clean one that can be used to identify future outliers.