Finding the rare instances or the outliers is important in many KDD (knowledge discovery and data-mining) applications, such
as detecting credit card fraud or finding irregularities in gene expressions. Signal-processing techniques have been introduced
to transform images for enhancement, filtering, restoration, analysis, and reconstruction. In this paper, we present a new
method in which we apply signal-processing techniques to solve important problems in data mining. In particular, we introduce
a novel deviation (or outlier) detection approach, termed
FindOut, based on wavelet transform. The main idea in FindOut is to remove the clusters from the original data and then identify
the outliers. Although previous research showed that such techniques may not be effective because of the nature of the clustering,
FindOut can successfully identify outliers from large datasets. Experimental results on very large datasets are presented
which show the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Keywords: Clustering; Data mining; Outliers; Wavelet
Received 7 September 2000 / Revised 2 February 2001 / Accepted in revised form 31 May 2001
Correspondence and offprint requests to: A. Zhang, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA.
Email: azhang@cse.buffalo.eduau