Clustering analysis and outlier detection are two important techniques widely
used in data mining and automatic knowledge discovery. Although research on
outlier analysis is relatively new in the area of data mining compared to data
clustering, they have both been addressed by many researchers and there exist
a large number of approaches to clustering and outlier analysis. While different
algorithms have their own strength in finding clusters and/or outliers, the performance
of a particular algorithm can be quite different with different datasets.
Therefore, the choice of clustering or outlier analysis methods depends on the
specific purpose of the application as well as the datasets available.