PhD Candidate from CIOP Group Wins Best Paper Award

Electrocardiogram with Anomalies

Markus Thill, who is PhD student in our CIOP group, is working on developing new anomaly detection algorithms since 2017 under supervision of Prof. Wolfgang Konen. The field of anomaly detection, which is today often tackled with machine learning algorithms, became a hot topic in the last years. Thill's recent paper titled "Anomaly detection in electrocardiogram readings with stacked LSTM networks" won the best paper award at the ITAT conference. LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) networks are a special form of recurrent neural networks and thus belong to the group of deep learning algorithms.

ITAT (Information technologies -- Applications and Theory) is an annual European conference being held in Slovakia. This year ITAT took place from 21 till 23 of September and hosted a number of interesting talks focusing on time series analysis topics including anomaly detection, forecasting etc. " Word guessing game with a social robotic head " was one of the three invited talks in this conference.

Thill uses a deep learning approach to tackle the challenging task of anomaly detection. This method, called LSTM-AD, is described in detail in this paper and shows very promising results compared to the state-of-the-art (see figure above). A distinguishing feature of LSTM-AD is that it learns unsupervised what an anomaly is, just by analysing sufficient data with predominantly normal behaviour. Thill's method is applied to electrocardiograms (heart beat recordings) and can detect anomalies in these electrocardiograms with great reliability.