Making the End-User a Priority in Benchmarking: OrionBench for Unsupervised Time Series Anomaly Detection

Time series anomaly detection is a prevalent problem in many application domains such as patient monitoring in healthcare, forecasting in finance, or predictive maintenance in energy. This has led to the emergence of a plethora of anomaly detection methods, including more recently, deep learning based methods. Although several benchmarks have been proposed to compare newly developed models, they usually rely on one-time execution over a limited set of datasets and the comparison is restricted to a few models. We propose OrionBench -- a user centric continuously maintained benchmark for unsupervised time series anomaly detection. The framework provides universal abstractions to represent models, extensibility to add new pipelines and datasets, hyperparameter standardization, pipeline verification, and frequent releases with published benchmarks. We demonstrate the usage of OrionBench, and the progression of pipelines across 15 releases published over the course of three years. Moreover, we walk through two real scenarios we experienced with OrionBench that highlight the importance of continuous benchmarks in unsupervised time series anomaly detection.