Combining Self-Organizing Map with Reinforcement Learning for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection

Abstract

Anomaly detection plays a critical role in condition monitors to support the trustworthiness of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Detecting multivariate anomalous data in such systems is challenging due to the lack of a complete comprehension of anomalous behaviors and features. This paper proposes a framework to address time series multivariate anomaly detection problems by combining the Self-Organizing Map (SOM) with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). By clustering the multivariate data, SOM creates an environment to enable the DRL agents interacting with the collected system  operational data in terms of a tabular dataset. In this environment, Markov chains reveal the likely anomalous features to support the DRL agent exploring and exploiting the state-action space to maximize anomaly detection performance. We use a time series dataset, Skoltech Anomaly Benchmark (SKAB), to evaluate our framework. Compared with the best results by some currently applied methods, our framework improves the F1 score by 9%, from 0.67 to 0.73. QC 20231220</p