Sintel: A Machine Learning Framework to Extract Insights from Signals

TL;DR

Sintel is an end-to-end machine learning framework designed for anomaly detection in time series data, supporting analysis, comparison, and human-in-the-loop refinement to improve detection accuracy and usability.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive, interactive framework that integrates state-of-the-art anomaly detection methods with human feedback for improved real-world application.

Findings

Demonstrated usability and efficiency on public datasets

Showed improved detection accuracy with human-in-the-loop annotations

Validated effectiveness through real-world spacecraft anomaly analysis

Abstract

The detection of anomalies in time series data is a critical task with many monitoring applications. Existing systems often fail to encompass an end-to-end detection process, to facilitate comparative analysis of various anomaly detection methods, or to incorporate human knowledge to refine output. This precludes current methods from being used in real-world settings by practitioners who are not ML experts. In this paper, we introduce Sintel, a machine learning framework for end-to-end time series tasks such as anomaly detection. The framework uses state-of-the-art approaches to support all steps of the anomaly detection process. Sintel logs the entire anomaly detection journey, providing detailed documentation of anomalies over time. It enables users to analyze signals, compare methods, and investigate anomalies through an interactive visualization tool, where they can annotate, modify, create, and remove events. Using these annotations, the framework leverages human knowledge to improve the anomaly detection pipeline. We demonstrate the usability, efficiency, and effectiveness of Sintel through a series of experiments on three public time series datasets, as well as one real-world use case involving spacecraft experts tasked with anomaly analysis tasks. Sintel's framework, code, and datasets are open-sourced at https://github.com/sintel-dev/.