A fuzzy index for detecting spatiotemporal outliers

Abstract

The detection of spatial outliers helps extract important and valuable information from large spatial datasets. Most of the existing work in outlier detection views the condition of being an outlier as a binary property. However, for many scenarios, it is more meaningful to assign a degree of being an outlier to each object. The temporal dimension should also be taken into consideration. In this paper, we formally introduce a new notion of spatial outliers. We discuss the spatiotemporal outlier detection problem, and we design a methodology to discover these outliers effectively. We introduce a new index called the fuzzy outlier index, FoI, which expresses the degree to which a spatial object belongs to a spatiotemporal neighbourhood. The proposed outlier detection method can be applied to phenomena evolving over time, such as moving objects, pedestrian modelling or credit card fraud.