Unsupervised outlier detection in streaming data using weighted clustering

Outlier detection is a very important task in many fields like network intrusion detection, credit card fraud detection, stock market analysis, detecting outlying cases in medical data etc. Outlier detection in streaming data is very challenging because streaming data cannot be scanned multiple times and also new concepts may keep evolving in coming data over time. Irrelevant attributes can be termed as noisy attributes and such attributes further magnify the challenge of working with data streams. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised outlier detection scheme for streaming data. This scheme is based on clustering as clustering is an unsupervised data mining task and it does not require labeled data. In proposed scheme both density based and partitioning clustering method are combined to take advantage of both density based and distance based outlier detection. Proposed scheme also assigns weights to attributes depending upon their respective relevance in mining task and weights are adaptive in nature. Weighted attributes are helpful to reduce or remove the effect of noisy attributes. Keeping in view the challenges of streaming data, the proposed scheme is incremental and adaptive to concept evolution. Experimental results on synthetic and real world data sets show that our proposed approach outperforms other existing approach (CORM) in terms of outlier detection rate, false alarm rate, and increasing percentages of outliers.