A literature review on one-class classification and its potential applications in big data

Abstract In severely imbalanced datasets, using traditional binary or multi-class classification typically leads to bias towards the class(es) with the much larger number of instances. Under such conditions, modeling and detecting instances of the minority class is very difficult. One-class classification (OCC) is an approach to detect abnormal data points compared to the instances of the known class and can serve to address issues related to severely imbalanced datasets, which are especially very common in big data. We present a detailed survey of OCC-related literature works published over the last decade, approximately. We group the different works into three categories: outlier detection, novelty detection, and deep learning and OCC. We closely examine and evaluate selected works on OCC such that a good cross section of approaches, methods, and application domains is represented in the survey. Commonly used techniques in OCC for outlier detection and for novelty detection, respectively, are discussed. We observed one area that has been largely omitted in OCC-related literature is its application context for big data and its inherently associated problems, such as severe class imbalance, class rarity, noisy data, feature selection, and data reduction. We feel the survey will be appreciated by researchers working in these areas of big data.