Association analysis can be used to find anomalies as follows. Find strong association patterns, which involve some minimum number of objects. Anomalies are those objects that do not belong to any such patterns. To make this more concrete, we note that the hyperclique association pattern discussed in Section 6.8 is particularly suitable for such an approach. Specifically, given a user-selected h-confidence level, maximal hyperclique patterns of objects are found. All objects that do not appear in a maximal hyperclique pattern of at least size three are classified as outliers.
(a) Does this technique fall into any of the categories discussed in this chapter? If so, which one?
(b) Name one potential strength and one potential weakness of this approach.