Heterogeneous univariate outlier ensembles in multidimensional data

Abstract

In outlier detection, recent major research has shifted from developing univariate methods to multivariate methods due to the rapid growth of multidimensional data. However, one typical issue of this paradigm shift is that many multidimensional data often mainly contains univariate outliers, in which many features are actually irrelevant. In such cases, multivariate methods are ineffective in identifying such outliers due to the potential biases and the curse of dimensionality brought by irrelevant features. Those univariate outliers might be well detected by applying univariate outlier detectors in individually relevant features. However, it is very challenging to choose a right univariate detector for each individual feature since different features may take very different probability distributions. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel Heterogeneous Univariate Outlier Ensembles (HUOE) framework and its instance ZDD to synthesize a set of heterogeneous univariate outlier detectors as base learners to build heterogeneous ensembles that are optimized for each individual feature. Extensive results on 19 real-world datasets and a collection of synthetic datasets show that ZDD obtains 5%–14% average AUC improvement over four state-of-the-art multivariate ensembles and performs substantially more robustly w.r.t. irrelevant features.