Time series anomaly detection using generative adversarial network discriminators and density estimation for infrastructure systems

Efficient data-driven defect detection techniques are crucial for maintaining service quality and providing early warnings for infrastructure systems. To this end, we proposed an effective unsupervised anomaly detection framework (DEGAN) using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The framework relies solely on normal time series data as input to train well-configured discriminators into standalone anomaly predictors by leveraging repeatedly collected data from an infrastructure system. Expected normal patterns in data are identified by generators, and well-configured discriminators are extracted to evaluate anomalies in unseen time series. Kernel density estimation (KDE) is coupled with discriminators for probabilistic anomaly detection. Through a Class I railroad track case study, we evaluated the performance of a convolutional DEGAN in detecting anomalies identified by operators, achieving recall and precision of 80% and 86%, respectively. We also investigated the influence of GAN architectures and parameters, model validation scheme (supervised vs. unsupervised), clustering, and the KDE parameters.