Analyzing rare event, anomaly, novelty and outlier detection terms under the supervised classification framework

In recent years, a variety of research areas have contributed to a set of related problems with rare event, anomaly, novelty and outlier detection terms as the main actors. These multiple research areas have created a mix-up between terminology and problems. In some research, similar problems have been named differently; while in some other works, the same term has been used to describe different problems. This confusion between terms and problems causes the repetition of research and hinders the advance of the field. Therefore, a standardization is imperative. The goal of this paper is to underline the differences between each term, and organize the area by looking at all these terms under the umbrella of supervised classification. Therefore, a one-to-one assignment of terms to learning scenarios is proposed. In fact, each learning scenario is associated with the term most frequently used in the literature. In order to validate this proposal, a set of experiments retrieving papers from Google Scholar, ACM Digital Library and IEEE Xplore has been carried out.