{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/explainable-online-unsupervised-anomaly","title":"Explainable Online Unsupervised Anomaly Detection for Cyber-Physical Systems via Causal Discovery from Time Series","arxiv_id":"2404.09871","date":"2024-04-15","proceeding":null,"authors":["Daniele Meli"],"abstract":"Online unsupervised detection of anomalies is crucial to guarantee the correct operation of cyber-physical systems and the safety of humans interacting with them. State-of-the-art approaches based on deep learning via neural networks achieve outstanding performance at anomaly recognition, evaluating the discrepancy between a normal model of the system (with no anomalies) and the real-time stream of sensor time series. However, large training data and time are typically required, and explainability is still a challenge to identify the root of the anomaly and implement predictive maintainance. In this paper, we use causal discovery to learn a normal causal graph of the system, and we evaluate the persistency of causal links during real-time acquisition of sensor data to promptly detect anomalies. On two benchmark anomaly detection datasets, we show that our method has higher training efficiency, outperforms the accuracy of state-of-the-art neural architectures and correctly identifies the sources of >10 different anomalies. The code is at https://github.com/Isla-lab/causal_anomaly_detection.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.09871v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.09871v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"explainable-online-unsupervised-anomaly","repo_url":"https://github.com/isla-lab/causal_anomaly_detection","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"anomaly-detection","task_name":"Anomaly Detection"},{"task_slug":"causal-discovery","task_name":"Causal Discovery"},{"task_slug":"time-series-1","task_name":"Time Series"},{"task_slug":"unsupervised-anomaly-detection","task_name":"Unsupervised Anomaly Detection"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}