Knowledge Reused Outlier Detection

Tremendous efforts have been invested in the unsupervised outlier detection research, which is conducted on unlabeled data set with abnormality assumptions. With abundant related labeled data available as auxiliary information, we consider transferring the knowledge from the labeled source data to facilitate the unsupervised outlier detection on target data set. To fully make use of the source knowledge, the source data and target data are put together for joint clustering and outlier detection using the source data cluster structure as a constraint. To achieve this, the categorical utility function is employed to regularize the partitions of target data to be consistent with source data labels. With an augmented matrix, the problem is completely solved by a K-means - a based method with the rigid mathematical formulation and theoretical convergence guarantee. We have used four real-world data sets and eight outlier detection methods of different kinds for extensive experiments and comparison. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and significant improvements of the proposed methods in terms of outlier detection and cluster validity metrics. Moreover, the parameter analysis is provided as a practical guide, and noisy source label analysis proves that the proposed method can handle real applications where source labels can be noisy.