Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques, 3rd Edition

12.6 Classification-Based Approaches

Outlier detection can be treated as a classification problem if a training data set with class labels is available. The general idea of classification-based outlier detection methods is to train a classification model that can distinguish normal data from outliers.

Consider a training set that contains samples labeled as “normal” and others labeled as “outlier.” A classifier can then be constructed based on the training set. Any classification method can be used (Chapters 8 and 9). This kind of brute-force approach, however, does not work well for outlier detection because the training set is typically heavily biased. That is, the number of normal samples likely far exceeds the number of outlier samples. This ...