Research on Anomaly Detection in Time Series: Exploring United States Exports and Imports Using Long Short-Term Memory

Abstract

This survey aims to offer a thorough and organized overview of research on anomaly detection, which is a significant problem that has been studied in various fields and application areas. Some anomaly detection techniques have been tailored for specific domains, while others are more general. Anomaly detection involves identifying unusual patterns or events in a dataset, which is important for a wide range of applications including fraud detection and medical diagnosis. Not much research on anomaly detection techniques has been conducted in the field of economic and international trade. Therefore, this study attempts to analyse the time-series data of United Nations exports and imports for the period 1992 – 2022 using LSTM based anomaly detection algorithm. Deep learning, particularly LSTM networks, are becoming increasingly popular in anomaly detection tasks due to their ability to learn complex patterns in sequential data. This paper presents a detailed explanation of LSTM architecture, including the role of input, forget, and output gates in processing input vectors and hidden states at each timestep. The LSTM based anomaly detection approach yields promising results by modelling small-term as well as long-term temporal dependencies.