Multi-level relationship outlier detection

Relationship management is critical in business. Particularly, it is important to detect abnormal relationships, such as fraudulent relationships between service providers and consumers. Surprisingly, in the literature there is no systematic study on detecting relationship outliers. Particularly, no existing methods can detect and handle relationship outliers between groups and individuals in groups. In this paper, we tackle this important problem by developing a simple yet effective model. The major novelty is that we identify two types of outliers and devise efficient detection algorithms. Our experiments on both real data and synthetic data confirm the effectiveness, efficiency and scalability of our approach. The techniques reported in this paper have been in production in a large scale business application.