Detecting anomalous senators

Am I correct in thinking that what SOS does is to find the datapoint at the position of lowest flux density, where flux is generated by datapoints and falls off according to some Gaussian-like function of the dissimilarity metric?

In other words, it's like you've got 100 senators standing in a 172 dimensional senate chamber, positioned according to their votes, and they're all shouting. SOS finds the one who suffers the least hearing loss? Except that it's not exactly like sound. With sound, you could have two big outliers shouting directly into each other's ears. They're definitely outliers, but they're still going deaf. The gaussian is somewhat like specifying a minimum distance so that halving the distance doesn't double the flux past a certain point. And it's nice and continuous instead of a hard cutoff. Anyway, is that an accurate way to think about it?

But then, instead of just summing the rows of the affinity matrix and normalizing like I'd expect, you normalize rows so they sum to 1 (the binding probability matrix) and multiply row values. My intuition tells me that'll give the same ordering as summing and normalizing. Is that true? Is multiplying the rows of the binding probability matrix different in an important way?

I really like the role that the gaussian plays. That's a new tool for my toolbox, thanks!

The algorithm is unsupervised, so it doesn't take any labels (i.e., party) into account. A senator is considered to be an anomaly when its 172 votes are too dissimilar from those of all the other senators.

As for the roll call voting data, the dataset has 103 data points, where each data point has 172 features. The outlier probability of a senator depends on the location of its corresponding data point in the 172-dimensional space.