TSAGen: Synthetic Time Series Generation for KPI Anomaly Detection

Chengyu Wang, Kui Wu, Tongqing Zhou, Guang Yu, Zhiping Cai

Abstract: A key performance indicator (KPI) consists of critical time series data that reflect the runtime states of network systems (e.g., response time and available bandwidth). Despite the importance of KPI, datasets for KPI anomaly detection available to the public are very limited, due to privacy concerns and the high overhead in manually labelling the data. The insufficiency of public KPI data poses a great barrier for network researchers and practitioners to evaluate and test what-if scenarios in the development of artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) and anomaly detection algorithms. To tackle the difficulty, we develop a univariate time series generation tool called TSAGen, which can generate KPI data with anomalies and controllable characteristics for KPI anomaly detection. Experiment results show that the data generated by TSAGen can be used for comprehensive evaluation of anomaly detection algorithms with diverse user-defined what-if scenarios.