Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) based Anomaly Detection in Industrial Software Systems

Adopting an accurate anomaly detection mechanism is crucial for industrial software systems in order to prevent system outages that can deteriorate system availability. However, employing a supervised machine learning technique to detect anomalies in large production scale industrial software systems is highly impractical due to the requirement of annotated data. This raises the need for comprehensive semi-supervised and unsupervised anomaly detection mechanisms. This paper presents the application of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based models to detect system anomalies using semi-supervised one-class learning. We show that the use of a variant of GAN known as bidirectional GAN (BiGAN) gives augmented results when compared to the traditional GAN based anomaly detection, for the selected industrial system. Moreover, the experiments clearly show that the performance of the BiGAN has a direct correlation with the dimensions of the dataset used for training. The BiGAN even tends to outperform the well-established semi-supervised One-class SVM classifier and a prominent generative network for semi-supervised anomaly detection, Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) when the size of the feature space increases.