Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 494

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 52 of the 52 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

ECOD: Unsupervised Outlier Detection Using Empirical Cumulative Distribution Functions

Open access
Li, Zheng, Zhao, Yue, Hu, Xiyang, Botta, Nicola, Ionescu, Cezar, Chen, George H.·2023·IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering

Abstract

Outlier detection refers to the identification of data points that deviate from a general data distribution. Existing unsupervised approaches often suffer from high computational cost, complex hyperparameter tuning, and limited interpretability, especially when working with large, high-dimensional datasets. To address these issues, we present a simple yet effective algorithm calledECOD(Empirical-Cumulative-distribution-based Outlier Detection), which is inspired by the fact that outliers are often the “rare events” that appear in the tails of a distribution. In a nutshell,ECODfirst estimates the underlying distribution of the input data in a nonparametric fashion by computing the empirical cumulative distribution per dimension of the data.ECODthen uses these empirical distributions to estimate tail probabilities per dimension for each data point. Finally,ECODcomputes an outlier score of each data point by aggregating estimated tail probabilities across dimensions. Our contributions are as follows: (1) we propose a novel outlier detection method calledECOD, which is both parameter-free and easy to interpret; (2) we perform extensive experiments on 30 benchmark datasets, where we find thatECODoutperforms 11 state-of-the-art baselines in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and scalability; and (3) we release an easy-to-use and scalable (with distributed support) Python implementation for accessibility and reproducibility.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1109/tkde.2022.3159580

Cites

52 of 52 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 52 references

Cited by

See all 494

Metadata

Authors
Li, Z., Zhao, Y., Hu, X., Botta, N., Ionescu, C., & Chen, G. H.
Venue
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
Published
2023-12-01
Volume
35
Issue
12
Pages
12181-12193
ISSN
  • 1041-4347 (ISSN-L)
  • 1558-2191
  • 2326-3865
OpenAlex
W4226060502
Cited by
494
References
52
FWCI
29.49
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: ECOD: Unsupervised Outlier Detection Using Empirical Cumulative Distribution Functions. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1109/tkde.2022.3159580
The paper
Li, Z., Zhao, Y., Hu, X., Botta, N., Ionescu, C., & Chen, G. H. (2023). ECOD: Unsupervised Outlier Detection Using Empirical Cumulative Distribution Functions. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1109/tkde.2022.3159580

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.