SA2E-AD: A Stacked Attention Autoencoder for Anomaly Detection in Multivariate Time Series

Anomaly detection for multivariate time series is an essential task in the modern industrial field. Although several methods have been developed for anomaly detection, they usually fail to effectively exploit the metrical-temporal correlation and the other dependencies among multiple variables. To address this problem, we propose a stacked attention autoencoder for anomaly detection in multivariate time series (SA2E-AD); it focuses on fully utilizing the metrical and temporal relationships among multivariate time series. We design a multiattention block, alternately containing the temporal attention and metrical attention components in a hierarchical structure to better reconstruct normal time series, which is helpful in distinguishing the anomalies from the normal time series. Meanwhile, a two-stage training strategy is designed to further separate the anomalies from the normal data. Experiments on three publicly available datasets show that SA2E-AD outperforms the advanced baseline methods in detection performance and demonstrate the effectiveness of each part of the process in our method.