Novel Evaluation Techniques for Outlier Detection Methods: A Case Study With RCOD

Outlier detection remains a key challenge in data analysis, with applications spanning cybersecurity, finance, medicine, and more. This paper introduces a comprehensive evaluation framework for comparing outlier detection methods, using the Random Clustering-based Outlier Detector (RCOD) as a case s...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Adam Kiersztyn, Krystyna Kiersztyn, Michal Horodelski, Dorota Pylak
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2025-01-01
Series:IEEE Access
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Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11106501/
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Summary:Outlier detection remains a key challenge in data analysis, with applications spanning cybersecurity, finance, medicine, and more. This paper introduces a comprehensive evaluation framework for comparing outlier detection methods, using the Random Clustering-based Outlier Detector (RCOD) as a case study. RCOD groups data points around randomly selected cluster centers and identifies outliers based on distance-based criteria and statistical thresholds. To enable more reliable assessment, two novel evaluation strategies are proposed: one based on deviations from the best-performing method per dataset, and another based on rank-based comparison. Experiments conducted on 30 benchmark datasets and 13 detection methods demonstrate RCOD’s superior performance and stability across accuracy, precision, and F1-score metrics. The proposed evaluation techniques provide a deeper insight into the effectiveness of outlier detectors than traditional performance metrics alone. Statistical validation confirms the significance of RCOD’s advantage, highlighting its robustness and applicability to diverse data environments.
ISSN:2169-3536