Contextual Spatial Outlier Detection with Metric Learning

Guanjie Zheng, Susan L. Brantley, Thomas Lauvaux, Zhenhui Li

Abstract: Hydraulic fracturing (or "fracking") is a revolutionary well stimulation technique for shale gas extraction, but has spawned controversy in environmental contamination. If methane from gas wells leaks extensively, this greenhouse gas can impact drinking water wells and enhance global warming. Our work is motivated by this heated debate on environmental issue and focuses on general data analytical techniques to detect anomalous spatial data samples (e.g., water samples related to potential leakages). Specifically, we propose a spatial outlier detection method based on contextual neighbors. Different from existing work, our approach utilizes both spatial attributes and non-spatial contextual attributes to define neighbors. We further use robust metric learning to combine different contextual attributes in order to find meaningful neighbors. Our technique can be applied to any spatial dataset. Extensive experimental results on five real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We also show some interesting case studies, including one case linking to leakage of a gas well.