Deep Anomaly Detection for Time-Series Data in Industrial IoT: A Communication-Efficient On-Device Federated Learning Approach

Since edge device failures (i.e., anomalies) seriously affect the production of industrial products in Industrial IoT (IIoT), accurately and timely detecting anomalies are becoming increasingly important. Furthermore, data collected by the edge device contain massive user’s private data, which is challenging current detection approaches as user privacy has attracted more and more public concerns. With this focus, this article proposes a new communication-efficient on-device federated learning (FL)-based deep anomaly detection framework for sensing time-series data in IIoT. Specifically, we first introduce an FL framework to enable decentralized edge devices to collaboratively train an anomaly detection model, which can improve its generalization ability. Second, we propose an attention mechanism-based convolutional neural network-long short-term memory (AMCNN-LSTM) model to accurately detect anomalies. The AMCNN-LSTM model uses attention mechanism-based convolutional neural network units to capture important fine-grained features, thereby preventing memory loss and gradient dispersion problems. Furthermore, this model retains the advantages of the long short-term memory unit in predicting time-series data. Third, to adapt the proposed framework to the timeliness of industrial anomaly detection, we propose a gradient compression mechanism based on Top- ${k}$ selection to improve communication efficiency. Extensive experimental studies on four real-world data sets demonstrate that our framework accurately and timely detects anomalies and also reduces the communication overhead by 50% compared to the FL framework that does not use the gradient compression scheme.