Novelty and surprise are two of the more exciting aspects of science – finding something totally new and unexpected can lead to a quick research paper, or it can make your career. As scientists, we all yearn to make a significant discovery. Petascale big data collections potentially offer a multitude of such opportunities. But how do we find that unexpected thing? These discoveries come under various names: interestingness, outlier, novelty, anomaly, surprise, or defect (depending on the application). Outlier? Anomaly? Defect? How did they get onto this list? Well, those features are often the unexpected, interesting, novel, and surprising aspects (patterns, points, trends, and/or associations) in the data collection. Outliers, anomalies, and defects might be insignificant statistical deviants, or else they could represent significant scientific discoveries.

(continue reading here … http://stats.cwslive.wiley.com/details/feature/6597751/Outlier-Detection-Gets-a-Makeover—Surprise-Discovery-in-Scientific-Big-Data.html)

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