Anomaly Detection for Temporal Data using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)

We explore the use of Long short-term memory (LSTM) for anomaly detection in temporal data. Due to the challenges in obtaining labeled anomaly datasets, an unsupervised approach is employed. We train recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with LSTM units to learn the normal time series patterns and predict future values. The resulting prediction errors are modeled to give anomaly scores. We investigate different ways of maintaining LSTM state, and the effect of using a fixed number of time steps on LSTM prediction and detection performance. LSTMs are also compared to feed-forward neural networks with fixed size time windows over inputs. Our experiments, with three real-world datasets, show that while LSTM RNNs are suitable for general purpose time series modeling and anomaly detection, maintaining LSTM state is crucial for getting desired results. Moreover, LSTMs may not be required at all for simple time series.