Local and Global Outlier Detection Algorithms in Unsupervised Approach: A Review

The problem of outlier detection is one of the most important issues in the field of analysis due to its applicability in several famous problem domains, including intrusion detection, security, banks, fraud detection, and discovery of criminal activities in electronic commerce. Anomaly detection comprises two main approaches: supervised and unsupervised approach. The supervised approach requires pre-defined information, which is defined as the type of outliers, and is difficult to be defined in some applications. Meanwhile, the second approach determines the outliers without human interaction. A review of the unsupervised approach, which shows the main advantages and the limitations considering the studies performed in the supervised approach, is introduced in this paper. This study indicated that the unsupervised approach suffers from determining local and global outlier objects simultaneously as the main problem related to algorithm parameterization. Moreover, most algorithms do not rank or identify the degree of being an outlier or normal objects and required different parameter settings by the research. Examples of such parameters are the radius of neighborhood, number of neighbors within the radius, and number of clusters. A comprehensive and structured overview of a large set of interesting outlier algorithms, which emphasized the outlier detection limitation in the unsupervised approach, can be used as a guideline for researchers who are interested in this field.