Patent ID: 8050989

Claim:
A computer program product encoding a computer program stored on a non-transitory computer readable storage medium for executing a set of instructions by a computer system comprising one or more computer processors for carrying out a method for identifying outlier hyper-cells in an N-dimensional hierarchical dataset having dimensions {x 1 , . . . X N }, the method comprising: a) given a plurality P GIVEN of hypercells {h 1 , . . . h m } for the N dimensions, each said hypercell h i P GIVEN having a respective participating-dimension set D i ⊂{x 1 , . . . X N }, for said each hypercell h i of said given plurality P GIVEN , categorizing, in accordance with a respective outlier score of said each hypercell hi, said each hypercell hi as one of: i) a likely outlier hypercell; and ii) a less-likely outlier hypercell, such that: i) a first categorized plurality P 1 CAT of said hypercells is categorized as likely-outliers; and ii) a second categorized plurality P 2 CAT of said hypercells is categorized as less-likely-outliers; b) selecting a sub-plurality P SUB ⊂P 2 CAT of hypercells {k 1 . . . k L } from said second categorized plurality P 2 CAT of less-likely-outliers in accordance with said outlier scores of hypercells said sub-plurality P SUB ⊂P 2 CAT of hypercells; c) from said sub-plurality P SUB of hypercells, forming a one-level-extension hypercell set of P 1 EXT including, for each hypercell k j of P SUB , a respective at least one one-level extension of said each hypercell k j of P SUB ; d) defining a set P′ GIVEN which includes at least some hypercells of P 1 EXT such that there is at least one one-level-extension hypercell hc, which is a one-level extension of a member cell mc mc P 2 CAT that is included in P′ GIVEN only if i) hc is not a previously considered hypercell; ii) hc is not a subcell of a previously categorized likely-outlier hypercell; and e) assigning P GIVEN =P′ GIVEN and repeating steps (a)-(d).