A Time Convolutional Network Based Outlier Detection for Multidimensional Time Series in Cyber-Physical-Social Systems

With the development of the Cyber-Physical-Social Systems(CPSS), a large number of multidimensional time series have been generated in today's world, such as: sensor data for industrial equipment operation, vehicle driving data, and cloud server operation and maintenance data and so on. The key task of Cloud-Fog-Edge Computing in managing these systems is how to detect anomalous data in a specific time series to facilitate operator action to solve potential system problems. So multidimensional time series outlier detection become an important direction of CPSS data mining and Cloud-Fog-Edge Computing research, and it has a wide range of applications in industry, finance, medicine and other fields. This paper proposes a framework called Multidimensional time series Outlier detection based on a Time Convolutional Network AutoEncoder (MOTCN-AE), which can detect outliers in time series data, such as identifying equipment failures, dangerous driving behaviors of cars, etc. Specifically, this paper first uses a feature extraction method to transform the original time series into a feature-rich time series. Second, the proposed TCN-AE is used to reconstruct the feature-rich time series data, and the reconstruction error is used to calculate outlier scores. Finally, the MOTCN-AE framework is validated by multiple time series datasets to demonstrate its effectiveness in detecting time series outliers.