An enhanced abnormal information expression spatiotemporal model for anomaly detection in multivariate time-series

The detection of anomalies in high-dimensional time-series has always played a crucial role in the domain of system security. Recently, with rapid advancements in transformer model and graph neural network (GNN) technologies, spatiotemporal modeling approaches for anomaly detection tasks have been greatly improved. However, most methods focus on optimizing upstream time-series prediction tasks by leveraging joint spatiotemporal features. Through experiments, we found that this modeling approach not only risks the loss of some original anomaly information during data preprocessing, but also focuses on optimizing the performance of the upstream prediction task and does not directly enhance the performance of the downstream detection task. We propose a spatiotemporal anomaly detection model that incorporates an improved attention mechanism in the process of temporal modeling. We adopt a heterogeneous graph contrastive learning approach in spatio modeling to compensate for the representation of anomalous behavioral information, thereby guiding the model through thorough training. Through validation on two widely used real-world datasets, we demonstrate that our model outperforms baseline methods. We also explore the impact of multivariate time-series prediction tasks on the detection task, and visualize the reasons behind the benefits gained by our model.