  Every field of Science is undergoing unprecedented changes in the discovery
process, and Astronomy has been a main player in this transition since the
beginning. The ongoing and future large and complex multi-messenger sky surveys
impose a wide exploiting of robust and efficient automated methods to classify
the observed structures and to detect and characterize peculiar and unexpected
sources. We performed a preliminary experiment on KiDS DR4 data, by applying to
the problem of anomaly detection two different unsupervised machine learning
algorithms, considered as potentially promising methods to detect peculiar
sources, a Disentangled Convolutional Autoencoder and an Unsupervised Random
Forest. The former method, working directly on images, is considered
potentially able to identify peculiar objects like interacting galaxies and
gravitational lenses. The latter instead, working on catalogue data, could
identify objects with unusual values of magnitudes and colours, which in turn
could indicate the presence of singularities.
