RDF: a density-based outlier detection method using vertical data representation

Outlier detection can lead to discovering unexpected and interesting knowledge, which is critical important to some areas such as monitoring of criminal activities in electronic commerce, credit card fraud, etc. In this paper, we developed an efficient density-based outlier detection method for large datasets. Our contributions are: a) we introduce a relative density factor (RDF); b) based on RDF, we propose an RDF-based outlier detection method which can efficiently prune the data points which are deep in clusters, and detect outliers only within the remaining small subset of the data; c) the performance of our method is further improved by means of a vertical data representation, P-trees. We tested our method with NHL and NBA data. Our method shows an order of magnitude speed improvement compared to the contemporary approaches.