Full title: Mining Distance-Based Outliers in Near Linear Time with Randomization and a Simple Pruning Rule Abstract: Defining outliers by their distance to neighboring examples is a popular approach to finding unusual examples in a data set. Recently, much work has been conducted with the goal of finding fast algorithms for this task. We show that a simple nested loop algorithm that in the worst case is quadratic can give near linear time performance when the data is in random order and a simple pruning rule is used. We test our algorithm on real high-dimensional data sets with millions of examples and show that the near linear scaling holds over several orders of magnitude. Our average case analysis suggests that much of the efficiency is because the time to process non-outliers, which are the majority of examples, does not depend on the size of the data set.

ABSTRACT The purpose of this work is to present the Weighted Forward Search (FSW) method for the detection of outliers in asset pricing data. This new estimator, which is based on an algorithm that downweights the most anomalous observations of the dataset, is tested using both simulated and empirical asset pricing data. The impact of outliers on the estimation of asset pricing models is assessed under different scenarios, and the results are evaluated with associated statistical tests based on this new approach. Our proposal generates an alternative procedure for robust estimation of portfolio betas, allowing for the comparison between concurrent asset pricing models. The algorithm, which is both efficient and robust to outliers, is used to provide robust estimates of the models’ parameters in a comparison with traditional econometric estimation methods usually used in the literature. In particular, the precision of the alphas is highly increased when the Forward Search (FS) method is used. We use Monte Carlo simulations, and also the well-known dataset of equity factor returns provided by Prof. Kenneth French, consisting of the 25 Fama-French portfolios on the United States of America equity market using single and three-factor models, on monthly and annual basis. Our results indicate that the marginal rejection of the Fama-French three-factor model is influenced by the presence of outliers in the portfolios, when using monthly returns. In annual data, the use of robust methods increases the rejection level of null alphas in the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and the Fama-French three-factor model, with more efficient estimates in the absence of outliers and consistent alphas when outliers are present.

There has been a tremendous increase in the volume of sensor data collected over the last decade for different monitoring tasks. For example, petabytes of earth science data are collected from modern satellites, in-situ sensors and different climate models. Similarly, huge amount of flight operational data is downloaded for different commercial airlines. These different types of datasets need to be analyzed for finding outliers. Information extraction from such rich data sources using advanced data mining methodologies is a challenging task not only due to the massive volume of data, but also because these datasets are physically stored at different geographical locations with only a subset of features available at any location. Moving these petabytes of data to a single location may waste a lot of bandwidth. To solve this problem, in this paper, we present a novel algorithm which can identify outliers in the entire data without moving all the data to a single location. The method we propose only centralizes a very small sample from the different data subsets at different locations. We analytically prove and experimentally verify that the algorithm offers high accuracy compared to complete centralization with only a fraction of the communication cost. We show that our algorithm is highly relevant to both earth sciences and aeronautics by describing applications in these domains. The performance of the algorithm is demonstrated on two large publicly available datasets: (1) the NASA MODIS satellite images and (2) a simulated aviation dataset generated by the ‘Commercial Modular Aero-Propulsion System Simulation’ (CMAPSS).

Understanding the statistics of fluctuation driven flows in the boundary layer of magnetically confined plasmas is desired to accurately model the lifetime of the vacuum vessel components. Mirror Langmuir probes (MLPs) are a novel diagnostic that uniquely allow us to sample the plasma parameters on a time scale shorter than the characteristic time scale of their fluctuations. Sudden large-amplitude fluctuations in the plasma degrade the precision and accuracy of the plasma parameters reported by MLPs for cases in which the probe bias range is of insufficient amplitude. While some data samples can readily be classified as valid and invalid, we find that such a classification may be ambiguous for up to 40% of data sampled for the plasma parameters and bias voltages considered in this study. In this contribution, we employ an autoencoder (AE) to learn a low-dimensional representation of valid data samples. By definition, the coordinates in this space are the features that mostly characterize valid data. Ambiguous data samples are classified in this space using standard classifiers for vectorial data. In this way, we avoid defining complicated threshold rules to identify outliers, which require strong assumptions and introduce biases in the analysis. By removing the outliers that are identified in the latent low-dimensional space of the AE, we find that the average conductive and convective radial heat fluxes are between approximately 5% and 15% lower as when removing outliers identified by threshold values. For contributions to the radial heat flux due to triple correlations, the difference is up to 40%.

Consider a scenario in which the data owner has some private/sensitive data and wants a data miner to access it for studying important patterns without revealing the sensitive information. Privacy preserving data mining aims to solve this problem by randomly transforming the data prior to its release to data miners. Previous work only considered the case of linear data perturbations — additive, multiplicative or a combination of both for studying the usefulness of the perturbed output. In this paper, we discuss nonlinear data distortion using potentially nonlinear random data transformation and show how it can be useful for privacy preserving anomaly detection from sensitive datasets. We develop bounds on the expected accuracy of the nonlinear distortion and also quantify privacy by using standard definitions. The highlight of this approach is to allow a user to control the amount of privacy by varying the degree of nonlinearity. We show how our general transformation can be used for anomaly detection in practice for two specific problem instances: a linear model and a popular nonlinear model using the sigmoid function. We also analyze the proposed nonlinear transformation in full generality and then show that for specific cases it is distance preserving. A main contribution of this paper is the discussion between the invertibility of a transformation and privacy preservation and the application of these techniques to outlier detection. Experiments conducted on real-life datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.

This article introduces lookout, a new approach to detect outliers using leave-one-out kernel density estimates and extreme value theory. Outlier detection methods that use kernel density estimates generally employ a user defined parameter to determine the bandwidth. Lookout uses persistent homology to construct a bandwidth suitable for outlier detection without any user input. We demonstrate the effectiveness of lookout on an extensive data repository by comparing its performance with other outlier detection methods based on extreme value theory. Furthermore, we introduce outlier persistence, a useful concept that explores the birth and the cessation of outliers with changing bandwidth and significance levels. The R package lookout implements this algorithm. Supplementary files for this article are available online.

The presence of outliers in response times can affect statistical analyses and lead to incorrect interpretation of the outcome of a study. Therefore, it is a widely accepted practice to try to minimize the effect of outliers by preprocessing the raw data. There exist numerous methods for handling outliers and researchers are free to choose among them. In this article, we use computer simulations to show that serious problems arise from this flexibility. Choosing between alternative ways for handling outliers can result in the inflation of p-values and the distortion of confidence intervals and measures of effect size. Using Bayesian parameter estimation and probability distributions with heavier tails eliminates the need to deal with response times outliers, but at the expense of opening another source of flexibility.

The genome is E. coli. Repeats of length 20, 25, 29, 35 and 40 are columns and Mason_variator iterations are rows.

This section presents a discussion of the research data. The data was received as secondary data however, it was originally collected using the time study techniques. Data validation is a crucial step in the data analysis process to ensure that the data is accurate, complete, and reliable. Descriptive statistics was used to validate the data. The mean, mode, standard deviation, variance and range determined provides a summary of the data distribution and assists in identifying outliers or unusual patterns. The data presented in the dataset show the measures of central tendency which includes the mean, median and the mode. The mean signifies the average value of each of the factors presented in the tables. This is the balance point of the dataset, the typical value and behaviour of the dataset. The median is the middle value of the dataset for each of the factors presented. This is the point where the dataset is divided into two parts, half of the values lie below this value and the other half lie above this value. This is important for skewed distributions. The mode shows the most common value in the dataset. It was used to describe the most typical observation. These values are important as they describe the central value around which the data is distributed. The mean, mode and median give an indication of a skewed distribution as they are not similar nor are they close to one another. In the dataset, the results and discussion of the results is also presented. This section focuses on the customisation of the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control) framework to address the specific concerns outlined in the problem statement. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the current process, value stream mapping was employed, which is further enhanced by measuring the factors that contribute to inefficiencies. These factors are then analysed and ranked based on their impact, utilising factor analysis. To mitigate the impact of the most influential factor on project inefficiencies, a solution is proposed using the EOQ (Economic Order Quantity) model. The implementation of the 'CiteOps' software facilitates improved scheduling, monitoring, and task delegation in the construction project through digitalisation. Furthermore, project progress and efficiency are monitored remotely and in real time. In summary, the DMAIC framework was tailored to suit the requirements of the specific project, incorporating techniques from inventory management, project management, and statistics to effectively minimise inefficiencies within the construction project.

The genome is E. coli. Half lengths of 6, 8, 10, 12, 14 and 16 are columns and Mason_variator iterations are rows.

We present a set of novel algorithms which we call sequenceMiner that detect and characterize anomalies in large sets of high-dimensional symbol sequences that arise from recordings of switch sensors in the cockpits of commercial airliners. While the algorithms we present are general and domain-independent, we focus on a specific problem that is critical to determining the system-wide health of a fleet of aircraft. The approach taken uses unsupervised clustering of sequences using the normalized length of the longest common subsequence (nLCS) as a similarity measure, followed by detailed outlier analysis to detect anomalies. In this method, an outlier sequence is defined as a sequence that is far away from the cluster centre. We present new algorithms for outlier analysis that provide comprehensible indicators as to why a particular sequence is deemed to be an outlier. The algorithms provide a coherent description to an analyst of the anomalies in the sequence when compared to more normal sequences. In the final section of the paper we demonstrate the effectiveness of sequenceMiner for anomaly detection on a real set of discrete sequence data from a fleet of commercial airliners. We show that sequenceMiner discovers actionable and operationally significant safety events. We also compare our innovations with standard HiddenMarkov Models, and show that our methods are superior.

Clinical discoveries largely depend on dedicated clinicians and scientists to identify and pursue unique and unusual clinical encounters with patients and communicate these through case reports and case series. This process has remained essentially unchanged throughout the history of modern medicine. However, these traditional methods are inefficient, especially considering the modern-day availability of health-related data and the sophistication of computer processing. Outlier analysis has been used in various fields to uncover unique observations, including fraud detection in finance and quality control in manufacturing. We propose that clinical discovery can be formulated as an outlier problem within an augmented intelligence framework to be implemented on any health-related data. Such an augmented intelligence approach would accelerate the identification and pursuit of clinical discoveries, advancing our medical knowledge and uncovering new therapies and management approaches. We define clinical discoveries as contextual outliers measured through an information-based approach and with a novelty-based root cause. Our augmented intelligence framework has five steps: define a patient population with a desired clinical outcome, build a predictive model, identify outliers through appropriate measures, investigate outliers through domain content experts, and generate scientific hypotheses. Recognizing that the field of obstetrics can particularly benefit from this approach, as it is traditionally neglected in commercial research, we conducted a systematic review to explore how outlier analysis is implemented in obstetric research. We identified two obstetrics-related studies that assessed outliers at an aggregate level for purposes outside of clinical discovery. Our findings indicate that using outlier analysis in clinical research in obstetrics and clinical research, in general, requires further development.

Here are six files that provide details for all 44,120 identified single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) or the 215 outlier SNPs associated with the evolution of rapid character displacement among replicate islands with (2Spp) and without competition (1Spp) between two Anolis species. On 2Spp islands, A. carolinensis occurs higher in trees and have evolved larger toe pads. Among 1Spp and 2Spp island populations, we identify 44,120 SNPs, with 215-outlier SNPs with improbably large FST values, low nucleotide variation, greater linkage than expected, and these SNPs are enriched for animal walking behavior. Thus, we conclude that these 215-outliers are evolving by natural selection in response to the phenotypic convergent evolution of character displacement. There are two, non-mutually exclusive perspective of these nucleotide variants. One is character displacement is convergent: all 215 outlier SNPs are shared among 3 out of 5 2Spp island and 24% of outlier SNPS are shared among all five out of five 2Spp island. Second, character displacement is genetically redundant because the allele frequencies in one or more 2Spp are similar to 1Spp islands: among one or more 2Spp islands 33% of outlier SNPS are within the range of 1Spp MiAF and 76% of outliers are more similar to 1Spp island than mean MiAF of 2Spp islands. Focusing on convergence SNP is scientifically more robust, yet it distracts from the perspective of multiple genetic solutions that enhances the rate and stability of adaptive change. The six files include: a description of eight islands, details of 94 individuals, and four files on SNPs. The four SNP files include the VCF files for 94 individuals with 44KSNPs and two files (Excel sheet/tab-delimited file) with FST, p-values and outlier status for all 44,120 identified single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with the evolution of rapid character displacement. The sixth file is a detailed file on the 215 outlier SNPs. Complete sequence data is available at Bioproject PRJNA833453, which including samples not included in this study. The 94 individuals used in this study are described in “Supplemental_Sample_description.txt” Methods Anoles and genomic DNA: Tissue or DNA for 160 Anolis carolinensis and 20 A. sagrei samples were provided by the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University (Table S2). Samples were previously used to examine evolution of character displacement in native A. carolinensis following invasion by A. sagrei onto man-made spoil islands in Mosquito Lagoon Florida (Stuart et al. 2014). One hundred samples were genomic DNAs, and 80 samples were tissues (terminal tail clip, Table S2). Genomic DNA was isolated from 80 of 160 A. carolinensis individuals (MCZ, Table S2) using a custom SPRI magnetic bead protocol (Psifidi et al. 2015). Briefly, after removing ethanol, tissues were placed in 200 ul of GH buffer (25 mM Tris- HCl pH 7.5, 25 mM EDTA, , 2M GuHCl Guanidine hydrochloride, G3272 SIGMA, 5 mM CaCl2, 0.5% v/v Triton X-100, 1% N-Lauroyl-Sarcosine) with 5% per volume of 20 mg/ml proteinase K (10 ul/200 ul GH) and digested at 55º C for at least 2 hours. After proteinase K digestion, 100 ul of 0.1% carboxyl-modified Sera-Mag Magnetic beads (Fisher Scientific) resuspended in 2.5 M NaCl, 20% PEG were added and allowed to bind the DNA. Beads were subsequently magnetized and washed twice with 200 ul 70% EtOH, and then DNA was eluted in 100 ul 0.1x TE (10 mM Tris, 0.1 mM EDTA). All DNA samples were gel electrophoresed to ensure high molecular mass and quantified by spectrophotometry and fluorescence using Biotium AccuBlueTM High Sensitivity dsDNA Quantitative Solution according to manufacturer’s instructions. Genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) libraries were prepared using a modified protocol after Elshire et al. (Elshire et al. 2011). Briefly, high-molecular-weight genomic DNA was aliquoted and digested using ApeKI restriction enzyme. Digests from each individual sample were uniquely barcoded, pooled, and size selected to yield insert sizes between 300-700 bp (Borgstrom et al. 2011). Pooled libraries were PCR amplified (15 cycles) using custom primers that extend into the genomic DNA insert by 3 bases (CTG). Adding 3 extra base pairs systematically reduces the number of sequenced GBS tags, ensuring sufficient sequencing depth. The final library had a mean size of 424 bp ranging from 188 to 700 bp . Anolis SNPs: Pooled libraries were sequenced on one lane on the Illumina HiSeq 4000 in 2x150 bp paired-end configuration, yielding approximately 459 million paired-end reads ( ~138 Gb). The medium Q-Score was 42 with the lower 10% Q-Scores exceeding 32 for all 150 bp. The initial library contained 180 individuals with 8,561,493 polymorphic sites. Twenty individuals were Anolis sagrei, and two individuals (Yan 1610 & Yin 1411) clustered with A. sagrei and were not used to define A. carolinesis’ SNPs. Anolis carolinesis reads were aligned to the Anolis carolinensis genome (NCBI RefSeq accession number:/GCF_000090745.1_AnoCar2.0). Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for A. carolinensis were called using the GBeaSy analysis pipeline (Wickland et al. 2017) with the following filter settings: minimum read length of 100 bp after barcode and adapter trimming, minimum phred-scaled variant quality of 30 and minimum read depth of 5. SNPs were further filtered by requiring SNPs to occur in > 50% of individuals, and 66 individuals were removed because they had less than 70% of called SNPs. These filtering steps resulted in 51,155 SNPs among 94 individuals. Final filtering among 94 individuals required all sites to be polymorphic (with fewer individuals, some sites were no longer polymorphic) with a maximum of 2 alleles (all are bi-allelic), minimal allele frequency 0.05, and He that does not exceed HWE (FDR <0.01). SNPs with large He were removed (2,280 SNPs). These SNPs with large significant heterozygosity may result from aligning paralogues (different loci), and thus may not represent polymorphisms. No SNPs were removed with low He (due to possible demography or other exceptions to HWE). After filtering, 94 individual yielded 44,120 SNPs. Thus, the final filtered SNP data set was 44K SNPs from 94 indiviuals. Statistical Analyses: Eight A. carolinensis populations were analyzed: three populations from islands with native species only (1Spp islands) and 5 populations from islands where A. carolinesis co-exist with A. sagrei (2Spp islands, Table 1, Table S1). Most analyses pooled the three 1Spp islands and contrasted these with the pooled five 2Spp islands. Two approaches were used to define SNPs with unusually large allele frequency differences between 1Spp and 2Spp islands: 1) comparison of FST values to random permutations and 2) a modified FDIST approach to identify outlier SNPs with large and statistically unlikely FST values. Random Permutations: FST values were calculated in VCFTools (version 4.2, (Danecek et al. 2011)) where the p-value per SNP were defined by comparing FST values to 1,000 random permutations using a custom script (below). Basically, individuals and all their SNPs were randomly assigned to one of eight islands or to 1Spp versus 2Spp groups. The sample sizes (55 for 2Spp and 39 for 1Spp islands) were maintained. FST values were re-calculated for each 1,000 randomizations using VCFTools. Modified FDIST: To identify outlier SNPs with statistically large FST values, a modified FDIST (Beaumont and Nichols 1996) was implemented in Arlequin (Excoffier et al. 2005). This modified approach applies 50,000 coalescent simulations using hierarchical population structure, in which demes are arranged into k groups of d demes and in which migration rates between demes are different within and between groups. Unlike the finite island models, which have led to large frequencies of false positive because populations share different histories (Lotterhos and Whitlock 2014), the hierarchical island model avoids these false positives by avoiding the assumption of similar ancestry (Excoffier et al. 2009). References Beaumont, M. A. and R. A. Nichols. 1996. Evaluating loci for use in the genetic analysis of population structure. P Roy Soc B-Biol Sci 263:1619-1626. Borgstrom, E., S. Lundin, and J. Lundeberg. 2011. Large scale library generation for high throughput sequencing. PLoS One 6:e19119. Bradbury, P. J., Z. Zhang, D. E. Kroon, T. M. Casstevens, Y. Ramdoss, and E. S. Buckler. 2007. TASSEL: software for association mapping of complex traits in diverse samples. Bioinformatics 23:2633-2635. Cingolani, P., A. Platts, L. Wang le, M. Coon, T. Nguyen, L. Wang, S. J. Land, X. Lu, and D. M. Ruden. 2012. A program for annotating and predicting the effects of single nucleotide polymorphisms, SnpEff: SNPs in the genome of Drosophila melanogaster strain w1118; iso-2; iso-3. Fly (Austin) 6:80-92. Danecek, P., A. Auton, G. Abecasis, C. A. Albers, E. Banks, M. A. DePristo, R. E. Handsaker, G. Lunter, G. T. Marth, S. T. Sherry, G. McVean, R. Durbin, and G. Genomes Project Analysis. 2011. The variant call format and VCFtools. Bioinformatics 27:2156-2158. Earl, D. A. and B. M. vonHoldt. 2011. Structure Harvester: a website and program for visualizing STRUCTURE output and implementing the Evanno method. Conservation Genet Resour 4:359-361. Elshire, R. J., J. C. Glaubitz, Q. Sun, J. A. Poland, K. Kawamoto, E. S. Buckler, and S. E. Mitchell. 2011. A robust, simple genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) approach for high diversity species. PLoS One 6:e19379. Evanno, G., S. Regnaut, and J. Goudet. 2005. Detecting the number of clusters of individuals using the software STRUCTURE: a simulation study. Mol Ecol 14:2611-2620. Excoffier, L., T. Hofer, and M. Foll. 2009. Detecting loci under selection in a hierarchically structured population. Heredity 103:285-298. Excoffier, L., G. Laval, and S. Schneider. 2005. Arlequin (version 3.0): An integrated software package for population genetics data analysis.

Outlier detection is essential for identifying unusual patterns or observations that significantly deviate from the normal behavior of a dataset. With the rapid growth of data science, the prevalence of anomalies and outliers has increased, which can disrupt system modeling and parameter estimation, leading to inaccurate results. Recently, deep learning-based outlier detection methods have gained significant attention, but their performance is often limited by challenges in parameter selection and the nearest neighbor search. To overcome these limitations, we propose a three-stage Efficient Outlier Detection Approach (named EODA), that not only detects outliers with high accuracy but also emphasizes dataset characteristics. In the first stage, we apply a feature selection algorithm based on the Boruta method and Random Forest to reduce the data size by selecting the most relevant attributes and calculating the highest Z-score of shadow features. In the second stage, we improve the K-nearest neighbors algorithm to enhance the accuracy of nearest neighbor identification in the clustering phase. Finally, the third stage efficiently identifies the most significant outliers within clustered datasets. We evaluate the proposed EODA algorithm across eight UCI machine-learning repository datasets. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our EODA approach, achieving a Precision of 63.07%, Recall of 82.49%, and an F1-Score of 64.53%, outperforming the existing techniques in the field.

Aquasplatche network simulation settingsTen folders corresponding to the ten networks described in Fourcade et al. Simulations can be performed using Aquasplatche.

The spatial signature of microevolutionary processes structuring genetic variation may play an important role in the detection of loci under selection. However, the spatial location of samples has not yet been used to quantify this. Here, we present a new two-step method of spatial outlier detection at the individual and deme levels using the power spectrum of Moran eigenvector maps (MEM). The MEM power spectrum quantifies how the variation in a variable, such as the frequency of an allele at a SNP locus, is distributed across a range of spatial scales defined by MEM spatial eigenvectors. The first step (Moran spectral outlier detection: MSOD) uses genetic and spatial information to identify outlier loci by their unusual power spectrum. The second step uses Moran spectral randomization (MSR) to test the association between outlier loci and environmental predictors, accounting for spatial autocorrelation. Using simulated data from two published papers, we tested this two-step method in different scenarios of landscape configuration, selection strength, dispersal capacity and sampling design. Under scenarios that included spatial structure, MSOD alone was sufficient to detect outlier loci at the individual and deme levels without the need for incorporating environmental predictors. Follow-up with MSR generally reduced (already low) false-positive rates, though in some cases led to a reduction in power. The results were surprisingly robust to differences in sample size and sampling design. Our method represents a new tool for detecting potential loci under selection with individual-based and population-based sampling by leveraging spatial information that has hitherto been neglected.

Effect sizes calculated using mean difference for burnt-unburnt study designs and mean change for before-after desings. Outliers, as defined in the methods section of the paper, were excluded prior to calculating effect sizes.

Ovarian carcinoma is the deadliest cancer of the female reproductive system. It is also a heterogeneous disease with five common histotypes: high-grade serous carcinoma (HGSC) accounts for 70% of cases, clear cell ovarian carcinoma (CCOC) for 12%, endometrioid (ENOC) for 11%, low-grade serous (LGSC) for 4%, and mucinous carcinoma (MUC) for 3%. They differ in their cellular morphologies, etiologies, molecular, genetic, and clinical characteristics. Histotype-based treatment is becoming increasingly prevalent with the introduction of PARP inhibitor therapy for patients with HGSC. Ovarian cancer histotype classification by pathologists is associated with challenges in diagnostic reproducibility and interobserver disagreement. Initial diagnosis is performed through histological assessment of hematoxylin & eosin (H&E)-stained sections, but studies have shown that for pathologists without gynecologic pathology-specific training, the interobserver agreement is only moderate. Furthermore, the number of pathologists trained has not kept up with the increasing volume of cancer diagnoses. OCEAN is a scientific competition for developing an artificial intelligence (AI)-based software package for histopathology images of ovarian cancers. Our challenge comprises digitalized samples from 25 centers, with each image falling into one of three categories: normal, an outlier, and one of the five histotypes of ovarian cancer. Participants are asked to develop deep learning methodologies for classifying ovarian cancer histotypes and identifying outliers. Additionally, variations between slide scanners, different tissue processing and staining protocols across various pathology labs, and inter-patient variability can lead to inconsistent color appearances in histopathology sections; therefore, the generalizability of the developed software is a key aspect of the competition that participants need to take into consideration.

IntroductionA common quality indicator for monitoring and comparing hospitals is based on death within 30 days of admission. An important use is to determine whether a hospital has higher or lower mortality than other hospitals. Thus, the ability to identify such outliers correctly is essential. Two approaches for detection are: 1) calculating the ratio of observed to expected number of deaths (OE) per hospital and 2) including all hospitals in a logistic regression (LR) comparing each hospital to a form of average over all hospitals. The aim of this study was to compare OE and LR with respect to correctly identifying 30-day mortality outliers. Modifications of the methods, i.e., variance corrected approach of OE (OE-Faris), bias corrected LR (LR-Firth), and trimmed mean variants of LR and LR-Firth were also studied.Materials and methodsTo study the properties of OE and LR and their variants, we performed a simulation study by generating patient data from hospitals with known outlier status (low mortality, high mortality, non-outlier). Data from simulated scenarios with varying number of hospitals, hospital volume, and mortality outlier status, were analysed by the different methods and compared by level of significance (ability to falsely claim an outlier) and power (ability to reveal an outlier). Moreover, administrative data for patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI), stroke, and hip fracture from Norwegian hospitals for 2012–2014 were analysed.ResultsNone of the methods achieved the nominal (test) level of significance for both low and high mortality outliers. For low mortality outliers, the levels of significance were increased four- to fivefold for OE and OE-Faris. For high mortality outliers, OE and OE-Faris, LR 25% trimmed and LR-Firth 10% and 25% trimmed maintained approximately the nominal level. The methods agreed with respect to outlier status for 94.1% of the AMI hospitals, 98.0% of the stroke, and 97.8% of the hip fracture hospitals.ConclusionWe recommend, on the balance, LR-Firth 10% or 25% trimmed for detection of both low and high mortality outliers.

Overview: This dataset provides comprehensive details about the assistance provided by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to Pakistan. It includes information on various aid activities, managing agencies, transaction types, fiscal details, and more.

Content: The dataset consists of 51 columns, encompassing information such as:

Country and Region Information: Country ID, Country Code, Country Name, Region ID, Region Name.

Income Group Classification: Income Group ID, Income Group Name, Income Group Acronym.

Managing Agency Details: Managing Agency ID, Managing Agency Acronym, Managing Agency Name.

Activity Information: Activity Name, Activity Description, Activity Project Number, Activity Start Date, Activity End Date.

Transaction Details: Transaction Type ID, Transaction Type Name, Fiscal Year, Current Dollar Amount, Constant Dollar Amount. Usage

Potential Applications: This data can be used for various analyses, including:

Trend Analysis: Understanding the trends in aid disbursement over time. Impact Assessment: Evaluating the impact of different aid activities. Regional Comparison: Comparing aid distribution across different regions within Pakistan. Anomaly Detection: Identifying outliers or unusual transactions that may require further investigation. License: It's essential to mention the license under which the dataset is shared if available.

Inspiration This dataset offers valuable insight into the international aid landscape and can inspire research, policy formulation, and decision-making in the field of international development, humanitarian aid, and economics.

File Name: "USaidpk.csv" File Size: (Size in MB) Format: CSV