Density-Based Spatial Anomalous Window Discovery

Abstract

The focus of this paper is to identify anomalous spatial windows using clustering-based methods. Spatial Anomalous windows are the contiguous groupings of spatial nodes which are unusual with respect to the rest of the data. Many scan statistics based approaches have been proposed for the identification of spatial anomalous windows. To identify similarly behaving groups of points, clustering techniques have been proposed. There are parallels between both types of approaches but these approaches have not been used interchangeably. Thus, the focus of our work is to bridge this gap and identify anomalous spatial windows using clustering based methods. Specifically, we use the circular scan statistic based approach and DBSCAN- Density based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise, to bridge the gap between clustering and scan statistics based approach. We present experimental results in US crime data Our results show that our approach is effective in identifying spatial anomalous windows and performs equal or better than existing techniques and does better than pure clustering.