Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection Using Working Memory Connections in Bi-Directional Long Short-Term Memory Autoencoder Network

“Normal” events are characterized as data patterns or behaviors that align with expected operational conditions, while “anomalies” are defined as deviations from these patterns, potentially signaling faults, errors, or unexpected system behaviors. The timely and accurate detection of anomalies plays a critical role in domains such as industrial manufacturing, financial transactions, and other related domains. In the context of Industry 4.0, the proliferation of sensors has resulted in a massive influx of time series data, making the anomaly detection of such multivariate time series data a popular research area. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) has been extensively recognized as an effective framework for modeling and processing time series data. Previous studies have combined Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) architecture with Autoencoder (AE) for multivariate time series anomaly detection. However, due to the inherent limitations of LSTM, Bi-LSTM-AE still cannot overcome these drawbacks. Our study replaces the LSTM units within the Bi-LSTM-AE architecture of existing research with Working Memory Connections for LSTM units and demonstrates that this architecture performs better in the field of multivariate time series anomaly detection compared to using standard LSTM units. The model we proposed not only outperforms the baseline models but also demonstrates greater robustness across various scenarios.