Anomaly Detection of Water Level Using Deep Autoencoder

Anomaly detection is one of the crucial tasks in daily infrastructure operations as it can prevent massive damage to devices or resources, which may then lead to catastrophic outcomes. To address this challenge, we propose an automated solution to detect anomaly pattern(s) of the water levels and report the analysis and time/point(s) of abnormality. This research’s motivation is the level difficulty and time-consuming managing facilities responsible for controlling water levels due to the rare occurrence of abnormal patterns. Consequently, we employed deep autoencoder, one of the types of artificial neural network architectures, to learn different patterns from the given sequences of data points and reconstruct them. Then we use the reconstructed patterns from the deep autoencoder together with a threshold to report which patterns are abnormal from the normal ones. We used a stream of time-series data collected from sensors to train the model and then evaluate it, ready for deployment as the anomaly detection system framework. We run extensive experiments on sensor data from water tanks. Our analysis shows why we conclude vanilla deep autoencoder as the most effective solution in this scenario.