# Abnormality Forecasting: Time Series Anomaly Prediction via Future Context Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.12206 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12206/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [Autoformer: Decomposition Transformers with Auto-Correlation for Long-Term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13008/) (2021)
- [FEDformer: Frequency Enhanced Decomposed Transformer for Long-term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12740/) (2022)
- [Transformers in Time Series: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07125/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Unsupervised Anomaly Detection via Variational Auto-Encoder for Seasonal KPIs in Web Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03903/) (2018)
- [LSTM-based Encoder-Decoder for Multi-sensor Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00148/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Deep Isolation Forest for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06602/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [SC-JEPA: Stabilizing Latent Predictive Learning for Time-Series Anomaly Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04643/) (2026)
- [RED-F: Reconstruction-Elimination based Dual-stream Contrastive Forecasting for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20044/) (2025)
- [Forecasting Anomaly Precursors via Uncertainty-Aware Time-Series Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17028/) (2026)
- [JAPE: Joint Anomaly Prediction and Intrinsic Explanation in Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11801/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Identifying anomalies from time series data plays an important role in various fields such as infrastructure security, intelligent operation and maintenance, and space exploration. Current research focuses on detecting the anomalies after they occur, which can lead to significant financial/reputation loss or infrastructure damage. In this work we instead study a more practical yet very challenging problem, time series anomaly prediction, aiming at providing early warnings for abnormal events before their occurrence. To tackle this problem, we introduce a novel principled approach, namely future context modeling (FCM). Its key insight is that the future abnormal events in a target window can be accurately predicted if their preceding observation window exhibits any subtle difference to normal data. To effectively capture such differences, FCM first leverages long-term forecasting models to generate a discriminative future context based on the observation data, aiming to amplify those subtle but unusual difference. It then models a normality correlation of the observation data with the forecasting future context to complement the normality modeling of the observation data in foreseeing possible abnormality in the target window. A joint variate-time attention learning is also introduced in FCM to leverage both temporal signals and features of the time series data for more discriminative normality modeling in the aforementioned two views. Comprehensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate that FCM gains good recall rate (70%+) on multiple datasets and significantly outperforms all baselines in F1 score. Code is available at https://github.com/mala-lab/FCM.