Exploring the effects of RNNs and deep learning frameworks on real‐time, lightweight, adaptive time series anomaly detection

Summary Real‐time, lightweight, adaptive time series anomaly detection is increasingly critical in cybersecurity, industrial control, finance, healthcare, and many other domains due to its capability to promptly process time series and detect anomalies without requiring extensive computation resources. While numerous anomaly detection approaches have emerged recently, they generally employ a single type of recurrent neural network (RNN) and are implemented using a single type of deep learning framework. The impacts of using various RNN types across different deep learning frameworks on the performance of these approaches remain unclear due to a lack of comprehensive evaluations. In this article, we aim to investigate the impact of different RNN variants and deep learning frameworks on real‐time, lightweight, and adaptive time series anomaly detection. We reviewed several state‐of‐the‐art anomaly detection approaches and implemented a representative approach using several RNN variants supported by three popular deep learning frameworks. A thorough evaluation was conducted to analyze the detection accuracy, time efficiency, and resource consumption of each implementation using four real‐world, open‐source time series datasets. The results show that RNN variants and deep learning frameworks have a significant impact. Therefore, it is crucial to carefully select appropriate RNN variants and deep learning frameworks for the implementation.