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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Costa, Efthymios, Papatsouma, Ioanna
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.07463
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author Costa, Efthymios
Papatsouma, Ioanna
author_facet Costa, Efthymios
Papatsouma, Ioanna
contents Outlier detection is an important data mining tool that becomes particularly challenging when dealing with nominal data. First and foremost, flagging observations as outlying requires a well-defined notion of nominal outlyingness. This paper presents a definition of nominal outlyingness and introduces a general framework for quantifying outlyingness of nominal data. The proposed framework makes use of ideas from the association rule mining literature and can be used for calculating scores that indicate how outlying a nominal observation is. Methods for determining the involved hyperparameter values are presented and the concepts of variable contributions and outlyingness depth are introduced, in an attempt to enhance interpretability of the results. The proposed framework is evaluated on both synthetic and publicly available data sets, demonstrating comparable performance to state-of-the-art frequent pattern mining algorithms and even outperforming them in certain cases. The ideas presented can serve as a tool for assessing the degree to which an observation differs from the rest of the data, under the assumption of sequences of nominal levels having been generated from a Multinomial distribution with varying event probabilities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_07463
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A novel framework for quantifying nominal outlyingness
Costa, Efthymios
Papatsouma, Ioanna
Methodology
62H30
Outlier detection is an important data mining tool that becomes particularly challenging when dealing with nominal data. First and foremost, flagging observations as outlying requires a well-defined notion of nominal outlyingness. This paper presents a definition of nominal outlyingness and introduces a general framework for quantifying outlyingness of nominal data. The proposed framework makes use of ideas from the association rule mining literature and can be used for calculating scores that indicate how outlying a nominal observation is. Methods for determining the involved hyperparameter values are presented and the concepts of variable contributions and outlyingness depth are introduced, in an attempt to enhance interpretability of the results. The proposed framework is evaluated on both synthetic and publicly available data sets, demonstrating comparable performance to state-of-the-art frequent pattern mining algorithms and even outperforming them in certain cases. The ideas presented can serve as a tool for assessing the degree to which an observation differs from the rest of the data, under the assumption of sequences of nominal levels having been generated from a Multinomial distribution with varying event probabilities.
title A novel framework for quantifying nominal outlyingness
topic Methodology
62H30
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.07463