outlier detection
Probabilistic data quality assessment for structural monitoring data via outlier-resistant conditional diffusion model
Data quality assessment is an essential step that ensures the reliability of the subsequent structural health monitoring (SHM) tasks. This study proposes a prediction deviation-based SHM data quality assessment method using a univariate implicit auto-regressive model, enabling outlier diagnosis and data cleaning. The proposed conditional diffusion model (CDM) augments the standard diffusion model with a conditional embedding module to incorporate temporal context, quartile normalization to mitigate distribution skew, and a Huber loss to enhance robustness against outliers. Within this univariate implicit autoregressive framework, each data point is assigned an outlier probability, quantifying its degree of "outlier-ness", and a global quality evaluation score is computed to characterize the overall dataset quality. Extensive case studies utilizing operational data from real-world structures demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly improves the accuracy of data quality assessment, outperforming other strong baselines representative of clustering, isolation-based, and deep reconstruction methods. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework are further demonstrated by the findings of ablation experiments and hyperparameter analysis.
Automatic Unsupervised Outlier Model Selection
Given an unsupervised outlier detection task on a new dataset, how can we automatically select a good outlier detection algorithm and its hyperparameter(s) (collectively called a model)? In this work, we tackle the unsupervised outlier model selection (UOMS) problem, and propose METAOD, a principled, data-driven approach to UOMS based on meta-learning. The UOMS problem is notoriously challenging, as compared to model selection for classification and clustering, since (i) model evaluation is infeasible due to the lack of hold-out data with labels, and (ii) model comparison is infeasible due to the lack of a universal objective function. METAOD capitalizes on the performances of a large body of detection models on historical outlier detection benchmark datasets, and carries over this prior experience to automatically select an effective model to be employed on a new dataset without any labels, model evaluations or model comparisons. To capture task similarity within our meta-learning framework, we introduce specialized metafeatures that quantify outlying characteristics of a dataset. Extensive experiments show that selecting a model by METAOD significantly outperforms no model selection (e.g.
RFX-Fuse: Breiman and Cutler's Unified ML Engine + Native Explainable Similarity
Breiman and Cutler's original Random Forest was designed as a unified ML engine -- not merely an ensemble predictor. Their implementation included classification, regression, unsupervised learning, proximity-based similarity, outlier detection, missing value imputation, and visualization -- capabilities that modern libraries like scikit-learn never implemented. RFX-Fuse (Random Forests X [X=compression] -- Forest Unified Learning and Similarity Engine) delivers Breiman and Cutler's complete vision with native GPU/CPU support. Modern ML pipelines require 5+ separate tools -- XGBoost for prediction, FAISS for similarity, SHAP for explanations, Isolation Forest for outliers, custom code for importance. RFX-Fuse provides a 1 to 2 model object alternative -- a single set of trees grown once. Novel Contributions: (1) Proximity Importance -- native explainable similarity: proximity measures that samples are similar; proximity importance explains why. (2) Dataset-specific imputation validation for general tabular data -- ranking imputation methods by how real the imputed data looks, without ground truth labels.