Identification of Incorrect Data Labels Using Conditional Outlier Detection

Outlier detection methods help one to identify unusual instances in data that may correspond to erroneous, exceptional, or surprising events or behaviors. This work studies conditional outlier detection, a special instance of the outlier detection problem, in the context of incorrect data label identification. Unlike conventional (unconditional) outlier detection methods that seek abnormalities across all data attributes, conditional outlier detection assumes data are given in pairs of input (condition) and output (response or label). Accordingly, the goal of conditional outlier detection is to identify incorrect or unusual output assignments considering their input as condition. As a solution to conditional outlier detection, this paper proposes the ratio-based outlier scoring (ROS) approach and its variant. The propose solutions work by adopting conventional outlier scores and are able to apply them to identify conditional outliers in data. Experiments on synthetic and real-world image datasets are conducted to demonstrate the benefits and advantages of the proposed approaches.