The Human Touch in Outlier Detection

How is an outlier in the data like obscenity? A case could be made that they're both the sort of thing where we know it when we see it, but that can be awfully tricky to perfectly define and detect. Visualize many data sets, and some of the data points are obvious outliers, but just as many (or more) fall in a gray area—especially if they're sneaky inliers. z-score, MAD, modified z-score, interquartile range (IQR), time-series decomposition, smoothing, forecasting, and many other techniques are available to the analyst for detecting outliers. Depending on the data, though, the most appropriate method (or combination of methods) for identifying outliers can change! We sat down with Brett Kennedy, author of Outlier Detection in Python, to dig into the topic! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.