Effective Detection of XML Outliers

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) became in recent years the new standard for data representation and exchange on the WWW. This has resulted in a great need for data cleaning techniques in order to identify outlying data. In this paper, we present a technique for outlier detection that singles out anomalies with respect to a relevant group of objects. We exploit a suitable encoding of XML documents that are encoded as signals of fixed frequency that can be transformed using Fourier Transforms. Outliers are identified by simply looking at the signal spectra. The results show the effectiveness of our approach.