Using anomaly detection

One of the great ways to find outliers is using the built-in Find anomalies tool in the Analysis pane of a visualization in Power BI. This feature of Power BI uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities to identify which data points are most different from other values in your data. The purpose of this feature is to help with analyzing the data so that action can be taken either against the data before business decisions are made or to help report consumers better understand the data and make informed business decisions.

To use this capability, you need to be using a supported visual (such as a line or scatter chart) and only one field on the y axis or values. This feature is being improved; so, at the time of writing, this was the requirement.

Figure 13.2 – Automated anomaly detection is built into some visualizations

Once this has been enabled, you can see the outliers identified with a gray dot. These are anomalies that...