Natural Neighbor Fuzzy Approximations With Granular-Ball Representation for Outlier Detection

In information systems lacking decision-making information, effectively leveraging fuzzy rough sets for outlier detection in complex data is challenging, especially in capturing inherent uncertainty and multi-granularity characteristics to construct discriminative outlier scores. However, existing fuzzy rough sets-based outlier detection methods often suffer from three key limitations: (1) Local data distributions are often ignored when calculating fuzzy relation matrices, resulting in inaccurate fuzzy similarity representations; (2) Use of all objects in fuzzy upper and lower approximations can weaken noise resistance and increase computational complexity; (3) Single-granularity data processing reduces efficiency and may fail to capture the multi-granularity nature of data, thereby limiting the adaptability of these methods in complex data environments. To address these issues, we propose to fuses Natural neighbor fuzzy approximations with Granular-ball representation for Outlier Detection (NGOD), which integrates the multi-granularity granular-ball representation and fuzzy rough sets to improve the effectiveness and robustness of unsupervised outlier detection. Specifically, we first define a local distribution-aware fuzzy relation, enabling more discriminative similarity calculations between samples. To improve the effectiveness and robustness of fuzzy upper and lower approximations, we propose a multi-granularity natural neighbor fuzzy approximation model, which effectively utilizes the inherent uncertainty and local abnormal information of data in approximations. Moreover, by introducing natural neighbors, NGOD can adaptively capture local abnormal information in the data without setting neighborhoods manually. Finally, the outlier factors of each sample are calculated in NGOD to measure their outlier degrees. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate that NGOD outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating its superior performance and adaptability. The NGOD code and associated datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/Mxeron/NGOD.