# DeepFIB: Self-Imputation for Time Series Anomaly Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.06247 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06247/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)
- [Strategies for Pre-training Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12265/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Generative Adversarial Networks to Guide Marker Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05921/) (2017)
- [A Unifying Review of Deep and Shallow Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11732/) (2020)
- [Detecting Spacecraft Anomalies Using LSTMs and Nonparametric Dynamic Thresholding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04431/) (2018)
- [Graph Neural Network-Based Anomaly Detection in Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06947/) (2021)
- [BRITS: Bidirectional Recurrent Imputation for Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10572/) (2018)
- [LSTM-based Encoder-Decoder for Multi-sensor Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00148/) (2016)
- [A Multimodal Anomaly Detector for Robot-Assisted Feeding Using an LSTM-based Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00614/) (2017)
- [A review on outlier/anomaly detection in time series data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04236/) (2020)
- [A Deep Neural Network for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection and Diagnosis in Multivariate Time Series Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08055/) (2018)
- [MAD-GAN: Multivariate Anomaly Detection for Time Series Data with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04997/) (2019)
- [Learning Graph Structures with Transformer for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection in IoT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03466/) (2021)
- [NAOMI: Non-Autoregressive Multiresolution Sequence Imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.10946/) (2019)
- [Time Series Change Point Detection with Self-Supervised Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14097/) (2020)
- [Federated Self-Supervised Learning of Multi-Sensor Representations for Embedded Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13018/) (2020)
- [Time Series Data Imputation: A Survey on Deep Learning Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11347/) (2020)
- [Time Series Anomaly Detection for Cyber-Physical Systems via Neural System Identification and Bayesian Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07992/) (2021)
- [Collective Anomaly Detection based on Long Short Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09752/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [A Review on Self-Supervised Learning for Time Series Anomaly Detection: Recent Advances and Open Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15196/) (2025)
- [NeuCoReClass AD: Redefining Self-Supervised Time Series Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00909/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Time series (TS) anomaly detection (AD) plays an essential role in various applications, e.g., fraud detection in finance and healthcare monitoring. Due to the inherently unpredictable and highly varied nature of anomalies and the lack of anomaly labels in historical data, the AD problem is typically formulated as an unsupervised learning problem. The performance of existing solutions is often not satisfactory, especially in data-scarce scenarios. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel self-supervised learning technique for AD in time series, namely DeepFIB. We model the problem as a Fill In the Blank game by masking some elements in the TS and imputing them with the rest. Considering the two common anomaly shapes (point- or sequence-outliers) in TS data, we implement two masking strategies with many self-generated training samples. The corresponding self-imputation networks can extract more robust temporal relations than existing AD solutions and effectively facilitate identifying the two types of anomalies. For continuous outliers, we also propose an anomaly localization algorithm that dramatically reduces AD errors. Experiments on various real-world TS datasets demonstrate that DeepFIB outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin, achieving up to 65.2% relative improvement in F1-score.