An automated outlier detection system implements an unsupervised set of processes to determine feature subspaces from a dataset; determine candidate exploratory actions, where each candidate exploratory action is a specific combination of a feature subspace and a parameterized instance of an outlier detection algorithm; and identify a set of optimal exploratory actions to recommend for execution on the dataset from among the candidate exploratory actions. Outlier scores obtained as a result of execution of the set of optimal exploratory actions are processed to obtain one or more outlier views such that each outlier view represents a consistent characterization of outliers by each optimal exploratory action corresponding to that outlier view.