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arXiv · 2508.12776

Randomized PCA Forest for Unsupervised Outlier Detection

Muhammad Rajabinasab·Farhad Pakdaman·Moncef Gabbouj·Peter Schneider-Kamp·Arthur Zimek
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Abstract

We propose a novel unsupervised outlier detection method based on Randomized Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Motivated by the performance of Randomized PCA (RPCA) Forest in approximate K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) search, we develop a novel unsupervised outlier detection method that utilizes RPCA Forest for unsupervised outlier detection by deriving an outlier score from its intrinsic properties. Experimental results showcase the superiority of the proposed approach compared to the classical and state-of-the-art methods in performing the outlier detection task on several datasets while performing competitively on the rest. The extensive analysis of the proposed method reflects its robustness and its computational efficiency, highlighting it as a good choice for unsupervised outlier detection.

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Muhammad Rajabinasab, Farhad Pakdaman, Moncef Gabbouj, Peter Schneider-Kamp, Arthur Zimek. 2025-08-18. Randomized PCA Forest for Unsupervised Outlier Detection. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12776

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