Perturbation Guiding Contrastive Representation Learning for Time Series Anomaly Detection

Time series anomaly detection is a critical task with applications in various domains. Due to annotation challenges, self-supervised methods have become the mainstream approach for time series anomaly detection in recent years. However, current contrastive methods categorize data perturbations into binary classes, normal or anomaly, which lack clarity on the specific impact of different perturbation methods. Inspired by the hypothesis that “the higher the probability of misclassifying perturbation types, the higher the probability of anomalies”, we propose PCRTA, our approach firstly devises a perturbation classifier to learn the pseudo-labels of data perturbations. Furthermore, for addressing “class collapse issue” in contrastive learning, we propose a perturbation guiding positive and negative samples selection strategy by introducing learnable perturbation classification networks. Extensive experiments on six realworld datasets demonstrate the significant superiority of our model over thirteen state-of-the-art competitors, and obtains average 5.14%, 8.24% improvement in F1 score and AUC-PR, respectively.