Unsupervised outlier detection for time-series data of indoor air quality using LSTM autoencoder with ensemble method

Abstract The proposed framework consists of three modules as an outlier detection method for indoor air quality data. We first use a long short-term memory autoencoder (LSTM-AE) based reconstruction error detector, which designs the LSTM layer in the shape of an autoencoder, to build a reconstruction error-based outlier detection model and extract latent features. The latent feature class-assisted vector machine detector constructs an additional outlier detection model using previously extracted latent features. Finally, the ensemble detector combines the two independent classifiers to define a new ensemble-based decision rule. Furthermore, because real-time anomaly detection proceeds with unsupervised learning, more stable and consistent external detection rules are defined than when using a single ensemble model. Laboratory tests with five random cases were performed for objective evaluation. Thus, we propose a framework that can be applied to various industrial environments by detecting and defining stable outlier decision rules.