Semi-supervised outlier detection via bipartite graph clustering

Abstract

A considerable amount of attributes in real datasets are not numerical, but rather textual and categorical. We investigate the problem of identifying outliers in categorical and textual datasets. We propose a clustering-based semi-supervised outlier detection method which basically represents normal and unlabeled data points as a bipartite graph. We leverage the existing free of parameters clustering techniques to cluster the resulting graph. The bipartite graph is clustered with a specific end goal to distinguish unlabeled data points as either outliers or normal data points. The proposed method is evaluated using multiple categorical and textual datasets against one-class support vector machines classifier and FRaC approach for semi-supervised outlier detection where the proposed method has shown a comparable performance.