# Precursor-of-Anomaly Detection for Irregular Time Series

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.15489 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15489/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Neural Ordinary Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07366/) (2018)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08114/) (2017)
- [An Overview of Multi-Task Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05098/) (2017)
- [End-to-End Multi-Task Learning with Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10704/) (2018)
- [CutPaste: Self-Supervised Learning for Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04015/) (2021)
- [Neural Controlled Differential Equations for Irregular Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08926/) (2020)
- [CSI: Novelty Detection via Contrastive Learning on Distributionally Shifted Instances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08176/) (2020)
- [Detecting Spacecraft Anomalies Using LSTMs and Nonparametric Dynamic Thresholding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04431/) (2018)
- [Anomaly Transformer: Time Series Anomaly Detection with Association Discrepancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02642/) (2021)
- [Deep Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02694/) (2019)
- [A Multimodal Anomaly Detector for Robot-Assisted Feeding Using an LSTM-based Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00614/) (2017)
- [Efficient GAN-Based Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06222/) (2018)
- [Multi-Task Learning in Natural Language Processing: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09138/) (2021)
- [Deep Anomaly Detection for Time-series Data in Industrial IoT: A Communication-Efficient On-device Federated Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09712/) (2020)
- [Neural Contextual Anomaly Detection for Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07702/) (2021)
- [Puzzle-AE: Novelty Detection in Images through Solving Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12959/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [MultiRC: Joint Learning for Time Series Anomaly Prediction and Detection with Multi-scale Reconstructive Contrast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15997/) (2024)
- [When Will It Fail?: Anomaly to Prompt for Forecasting Future Anomalies in Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23596/) (2025)
- [SC-JEPA: Stabilizing Latent Predictive Learning for Time-Series Anomaly Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04643/) (2026)
- [GDFlow: Anomaly Detection with NCDE-based Normalizing Flow for Advanced Driver Assistance System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05346/) (2024)
- [RED-F: Reconstruction-Elimination based Dual-stream Contrastive Forecasting for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20044/) (2025)
- [LLM-Assisted Logic Rule Learning: Scaling Human Expertise for Time Series Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19255/) (2026)
- [VISTA: Unsupervised 2D Temporal Dependency Representations for Time Series Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02498/) (2025)
- [Forecasting Anomaly Precursors via Uncertainty-Aware Time-Series Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17028/) (2026)
- [Transformer autoencoder with local attention for sparse and irregular time series with application on risk estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08914/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Anomaly detection is an important field that aims to identify unexpected patterns or data points, and it is closely related to many real-world problems, particularly to applications in finance, manufacturing, cyber security, and so on. While anomaly detection has been studied extensively in various fields, detecting future anomalies before they occur remains an unexplored territory. In this paper, we present a novel type of anomaly detection, called Precursor-of-Anomaly (PoA) detection. Unlike conventional anomaly detection, which focuses on determining whether a given time series observation is an anomaly or not, PoA detection aims to detect future anomalies before they happen. To solve both problems at the same time, we present a neural controlled differential equation-based neural network and its multi-task learning algorithm. We conduct experiments using 17 baselines and 3 datasets, including regular and irregular time series, and demonstrate that our presented method outperforms the baselines in almost all cases. Our ablation studies also indicate that the multitasking training method significantly enhances the overall performance for both anomaly and PoA detection.