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Poster

The Elephant in the Room: Towards A Reliable Time-Series Anomaly Detection Benchmark

Qinghua Liu · John Paparrizos

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Fri 13 Dec 4:30 p.m. PST — 7:30 p.m. PST

Abstract:

Time-series anomaly detection is a fundamental task across scientific fields and industries. However, the field has long faced the ``elephant in the room:'' critical issues including flawed datasets, biased evaluation metrics, and inconsistent benchmarking practices that have remained largely ignored and unaddressed. We introduce the TSB-AD to systematically tackle these issues in the following three aspects: (i) Dataset Integrity: with 1020 high-quality time series refined from an initial collection of 4k spanning 33 diverse domains, we provide the first large-scale, heterogeneous, meticulously curated dataset that combines the effort of human perception and model interpretation; (ii) Metric Reliability: by revealing bias in evaluation metrics, we perform ranking aggregation on a set of reliable evaluation metrics for comprehensive capturing of model performance and robustness to address concerns from the community; (iii) Comprehensive Benchmarking: with a broad spectrum of 35 detection algorithms, from statistical methods to the latest foundation models, we perform systematic hyperparameter tuning for a fair and complete comparison. Our findings challenge the conventional wisdom regarding the superiority of advanced neural network architectures, revealing that simpler architectures and statistical methods often yield better performance. While foundation models demonstrate promise, we need to proceed with caution in terms of data contamination. We open-source the dataset and implementation at https://github.com/TheDatumOrg/TSB-AD to promote further research.

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