Zhe Li

Zhe Li, Chunhua Sun, Chunli Liu et al.

Outlier detection is an important task in data mining and many technologies have been explored in various applications. However, due to the default assumption that outliers are non-concentrated, unsupervised outlier detection may not correctly detect group anomalies with higher density levels. As for the supervised outlier detection, although high detection rates and optimal parameters can usually be achieved, obtaining sufficient and correct labels is a time-consuming task. To address these issues, we focus on semi-supervised outlier detection with few identified anomalies, in the hope of using limited labels to achieve high detection accuracy. First, we propose a novel detection model Dual-GAN, which can directly utilize the potential information in identified anomalies to detect discrete outliers and partially identified group anomalies simultaneously. And then, considering the instances with similar output values may not all be similar in a complex data structure, we replace the two MO-GAN components in Dual-GAN with the combination of RCC and M-GAN (RCC-Dual-GAN). In addition, to deal with the evaluation of Nash equilibrium and the selection of optimal model, two evaluation indicators are created and introduced into the two models to make the detection process more intelligent. Extensive experiments on both benchmark datasets and two practical tasks demonstrate that our proposed approaches (i.e., Dual-GAN and RCC-Dual-GAN) can significantly improve the accuracy of outlier detection even with only a few identified anomalies. Moreover, compared with the two MO-GAN components in Dual-GAN, the network structure combining RCC and M-GAN has greater stability in various situations.

Yezheng Liu, Zhe Li, Chong Zhou et al.

Outlier detection is an important topic in machine learning and has been used in a wide range of applications. In this paper, we approach outlier detection as a binary-classification issue by sampling potential outliers from a uniform reference distribution. However, due to the sparsity of data in high-dimensional space, a limited number of potential outliers may fail to provide sufficient information to assist the classifier in describing a boundary that can separate outliers from normal data effectively. To address this, we propose a novel Single-Objective Generative Adversarial Active Learning (SO-GAAL) method for outlier detection, which can directly generate informative potential outliers based on the mini-max game between a generator and a discriminator. Moreover, to prevent the generator from falling into the mode collapsing problem, the stop node of training should be determined when SO-GAAL is able to provide sufficient information. But without any prior information, it is extremely difficult for SO-GAAL. Therefore, we expand the network structure of SO-GAAL from a single generator to multiple generators with different objectives (MO-GAAL), which can generate a reasonable reference distribution for the whole dataset. We empirically compare the proposed approach with several state-of-the-art outlier detection methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets. The results show that MO-GAAL outperforms its competitors in the majority of cases, especially for datasets with various cluster types or high irrelevant variable ratio.