An Outlier Detection Method Based on Clustering

In this paper we propose a clustering based method to capture outliers. We apply K-means clustering algorithm to divide the data set into clusters. The points which are lying near the centroid of the cluster are not probable candidate for outlier and we can prune out such points from each cluster. Next we calculate a distance based outlier score for remaining points. The computations needed to calculate the outlier score reduces considerably due to the pruning of some points. Based on the outlier score we declare the top n points with the highest score as outliers. The experimental results using real data set demonstrate that even though the number of computations is less, the proposed method performs better than the existing method.