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On Detecting Spatial Outliers

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Abstract

The ever-increasing volume of spatial data has greatly challenged our ability to extract useful but implicit knowledge from them. As an important branch of spatial data mining, spatial outlier detection aims to discover the objects whose non-spatial attribute values are significantly different from the values of their spatial neighbors. These objects, called spatial outliers, may reveal important phenomena in a number of applications including traffic control, satellite image analysis, weather forecast, and medical diagnosis. Most of the existing spatial outlier detection algorithms mainly focus on identifying single attribute outliers and could potentially misclassify normal objects as outliers when their neighborhoods contain real spatial outliers with very large or small attribute values. In addition, many spatial applications contain multiple non-spatial attributes which should be processed altogether to identify outliers. To address these two issues, we formulate the spatial outlier detection problem in a general way, design two robust detection algorithms, one for single attribute and the other for multiple attributes, and analyze their computational complexities. Experiments were conducted on a real-world data set, West Nile virus data, to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Preventive Medicine and Biometrics, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, MD, 20814, USA

    Dechang Chen

  2. Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 7054 Haycock Road, Falls Church, VA, 22043, USA

    Chang-Tien Lu, Yufeng Kou & Feng Chen

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  1. Dechang Chen
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  2. Chang-Tien Lu
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  3. Yufeng Kou
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  4. Feng Chen
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Correspondence to Feng Chen.

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Chen, D., Lu, CT., Kou, Y. et al. On Detecting Spatial Outliers. Geoinformatica 12, 455–475 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10707-007-0038-8

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