Fusing separated representation into an autoencoder for magnetic materials outlier detection

In materials science, an outlier may be due to variability in measurement, or it may indicate experimental errors. In this paper, we used an unsupervised method to remove outliers before further data-driven material analysis. Recently, autoencoder networks have achieved excellent results by minimizing reconstruction error. However, autoencoders do not promote the separation between outliers and inliers. The proposed SRAE model integrates latent representation to optimize the reconstruction error and ensures that outliers always deviate from the dataset in the compressed representation space. Experiments on the Nd-Fe-B magnetic materials dataset also show that after removing outliers with the proposed method, the prediction result of material property is significantly improved, indicating that the outlier detection effect is excellent.