Deep Variational Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection within multivariate time series (MTS) is an essential task in both data mining and service quality management. Many recent works on anomaly detection focus on designing unsupervised probabilistic models toextract robust normal patterns of MTS. In this paper, we model sensor dependency and stochasticity within MTS by developing an embedding-guided probabilistic generative network. We combine it with adaptive variational graph convolutional recurrent network %and get variational GCRN (VGCRN) to model both spatial and temporal fine-grained correlations in MTS. To explore hierarchical latent representations, we further extend VGCRN into a deep variational network, which captures multilevel information at different layers and is robust to noisy time series. Moreover, we develop an upward-downward variational inference scheme that considers both forecasting-based and reconstruction-based losses, achieving an accurate posterior approximation of latent variables with better MTS representations. The experiments verify the superiority of the proposed method over current state-of-the-art methods.