Multivariate Spatial Outlier Detection

A spatial outlier is a spatially referenced object whose non-spatial attribute values are significantly different from the values of its neighborhood. Identification of spatial outliers can lead to the discovery of unexpected, interesting, and useful spatial patterns for further analysis. Previous work in spatial outlier detection focuses on detecting spatial outliers with a single attribute. In the paper, we propose two approaches to discover spatial outliers with multiple attributes. We formulate the multi-attribute spatial outlier detection problem in a general way, provide two effective detection algorithms, and analyze their computation complexity. In addition, using a real-world census data, we demonstrate that our approaches can effectively identify local abnormality in large spatial data sets.