A new outlier detection method based on convex optimization: application to diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease

Neuroscience is a combination of different scientific disciplines which investigate the nervous system for understanding of the biological basis. Recently, applications to the diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s disease have become very promising by considering different statistical regression models. However, well-known statistical regression models may give misleading results for the diagnosis of the neurodegenerative diseases when experimental data contain outlier observations that lie an abnormal distance from the other observation. The main achievements of this study consist of a novel mathematics-supported approach beside statistical regression models to identify and treat the outlier observations without direct elimination for a great and emerging challenge in humankind, such as neurodegenerative diseases. By this approach, a new method named as CMTMSOM is proposed with the contributions of the powerful convex and continuous optimization techniques referred to as conic quadratic programing. This method, based on the mean-shift outlier regression model, is developed by combining robustness of M-estimation and stability of Tikhonov regularization. We apply our method and other parametric models on Parkinson telemonitoring dataset which is a real-world dataset in Neuroscience. Then, we compare these methods by using well-known method-free performance measures. The results indicate that the CMTMSOM method performs better than current parametric models.