No Arabic abstract
Deep generative models have demonstrated their effectiveness in learning latent representation and modeling complex dependencies of time series. In this paper, we present a Smoothness-Inducing Sequential Variational Auto-Encoder (SISVAE) model for robust estimation and anomaly detection of multi-dimensional time series. Our model is based on Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE), and its backbone is fulfilled by a Recurrent Neural Network to capture latent temporal structures of time series for both generative model and inference model. Specifically, our model parameterizes mean and variance for each time-stamp with flexible neural networks, resulting in a non-stationary model that can work without the assumption of constant noise as commonly made by existing Markov models. However, such a flexibility may cause the model fragile to anomalies. To achieve robust density estimation which can also benefit detection tasks, we propose a smoothness-inducing prior over possible estimations. The proposed prior works as a regularizer that places penalty at non-smooth reconstructions. Our model is learned efficiently with a novel stochastic gradient variational Bayes estimator. In particular, we study two decision criteria for anomaly detection: reconstruction probability and reconstruction error. We show the effectiveness of our model on both synthetic datasets and public real-world benchmarks.
To ensure undisrupted business, large Internet companies need to closely monitor various KPIs (e.g., Page Views, number of online users, and number of orders) of its Web applications, to accurately detect anomalies and trigger timely troubleshooting/mitigation. However, anomaly detection for these seasonal KPIs with various patterns and data quality has been a great challenge, especially without labels. In this paper, we proposed Donut, an unsupervised anomaly detection algorithm based on VAE. Thanks to a few of our key techniques, Donut greatly outperforms a state-of-arts supervised ensemble approach and a baseline VAE approach, and its best F-scores range from 0.75 to 0.9 for the studied KPIs from a top global Internet company. We come up with a novel KDE interpretation of reconstruction for Donut, making it the first VAE-based anomaly detection algorithm with solid theoretical explanation.
Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs) have become very popular techniques to perform inference and learning in latent variable models as they allow us to leverage the rich representational power of neural networks to obtain flexible approximations of the posterior of latent variables as well as tight evidence lower bounds (ELBOs). Combined with stochastic variational inference, this provides a methodology scaling to large datasets. However, for this methodology to be practically efficient, it is necessary to obtain low-variance unbiased estimators of the ELBO and its gradients with respect to the parameters of interest. While the use of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques such as Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) has been previously suggested to achieve this [23, 26], the proposed methods require specifying reverse kernels which have a large impact on performance. Additionally, the resulting unbiased estimator of the ELBO for most MCMC kernels is typically not amenable to the reparameterization trick. We show here how to optimally select reverse kernels in this setting and, by building upon Hamiltonian Importance Sampling (HIS) [17], we obtain a scheme that provides low-variance unbiased estimators of the ELBO and its gradients using the reparameterization trick. This allows us to develop a Hamiltonian Variational Auto-Encoder (HVAE). This method can be reinterpreted as a target-informed normalizing flow [20] which, within our context, only requires a few evaluations of the gradient of the sampled likelihood and trivial Jacobian calculations at each iteration.
Anomaly detection has been a challenging task given high-dimensional multivariate time series data generated by networked sensors and actuators in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Besides the highly nonlinear, complex, and dynamic natures of such time series, the lack of labeled data impedes data exploitation in a supervised manner and thus prevents an accurate detection of abnormal phenomenons. On the other hand, the collected data at the edge of the network is often privacy sensitive and large in quantity, which may hinder the centralized training at the main server. To tackle these issues, we propose an unsupervised time series anomaly detection framework in a federated fashion to continuously monitor the behaviors of interconnected devices within a network and alerts for abnormal incidents so that countermeasures can be taken before undesired consequences occur. To be specific, we leave the training data distributed at the edge to learn a shared Variational Autoencoder (VAE) based on Convolutional Gated Recurrent Unit (ConvGRU) model, which jointly captures feature and temporal dependencies in the multivariate time series data for representation learning and downstream anomaly detection tasks. Experiments on three real-world networked sensor datasets illustrate the advantage of our approach over other state-of-the-art models. We also conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our detection framework under non-federated and federated settings in terms of overall performance and detection latency.
To act and plan in complex environments, we posit that agents should have a mental simulator of the world with three characteristics: (a) it should build an abstract state representing the condition of the world; (b) it should form a belief which represents uncertainty on the world; (c) it should go beyond simple step-by-step simulation, and exhibit temporal abstraction. Motivated by the absence of a model satisfying all these requirements, we propose TD-VAE, a generative sequence model that learns representations containing explicit beliefs about states several steps into the future, and that can be rolled out directly without single-step transitions. TD-VAE is trained on pairs of temporally separated time points, using an analogue of temporal difference learning used in reinforcement learning.
Clustering is essential to many tasks in pattern recognition and computer vision. With the advent of deep learning, there is an increasing interest in learning deep unsupervised representations for clustering analysis. Many works on this domain rely on variants of auto-encoders and use the encoder outputs as representations/features for clustering. In this paper, we show that an l2 normalization constraint on these representations during auto-encoder training, makes the representations more separable and compact in the Euclidean space after training. This greatly improves the clustering accuracy when k-means clustering is employed on the representations. We also propose a clustering based unsupervised anomaly detection method using l2 normalized deep auto-encoder representations. We show the effect of l2 normalization on anomaly detection accuracy. We further show that the proposed anomaly detection method greatly improves accuracy compared to previously proposed deep methods such as reconstruction error based anomaly detection.