RESTAD: Reconstruction and Similarity Based Transformer for Time Series Anomaly Detection

Abstract

Anomaly detection in time series data is crucial across various domains. The scarcity of labeled data for such tasks has increased the attention towards unsupervised learning methods. These approaches, often relying solely on reconstruction error, typically fail to detect subtle anomalies in complex datasets. To address this, we introduce RESTAD, an adaptation of the Transformer model by incorporating a layer of Radial Basis Function (RBF) neurons within its architecture. This layer fits a non-parametric density in the latent representation, such that a high RBF output indicates similarity with predominantly normal training data. RESTAD integrates the RBF similarity scores with the reconstruction errors to increase sensitivity to anomalies. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that RESTAD outperforms various established baselines across multiple benchmark datasets.