The increasing availability of time series datasets enabled by the diffusion of IoT architectures and the progress in the analysis of temporal data fostered by Deep Learning methods are boosting the interest in anomaly detection and predictive maintenance applications. The analysis of performance for these tasks relies on standard metrics applied to the entire dataset. Such indicators provide a global performance assessment but might not provide a deep understanding of the model weaknesses. A complementary diagnostic approach exploits error categorization and ad hoc visualizations. In this paper, we present ODIN TS, an open source diagnosis framework for time series analysis that lets developers compute performance metrics, disaggregated by different criteria, and visualize diagnosis reports. ODIN TS is agnostic to the training platform and can be extended with application- and domain-specific meta-annotations and metrics with almost no coding. We show ODIN TS at work through two time series analytics examples.
The application of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to a broad variety of tasks demands methods for coping with the complex and opaque nature of these architectures. When a gold standard is available, performance assessment treats the DNN as a black box and computes standard metrics based on the comparison of the predictions with the ground truth. A deeper understanding of performances requires going beyond such evaluation metrics to diagnose the model behavior and the prediction errors. This goal can be pursued in two complementary ways. On one side, model interpretation techniques "open the box" and assess the relationship between the input, the inner layers and the output, so as to identify the architecture modules most likely to cause the performance loss. On the other hand, black-box error diagnosis techniques study the correlation between the model response and some properties of the input not used for training, so as to identify the features of the inputs that make the model fail. Both approaches give hints on how to improve the architecture and/or the training process. This paper focuses on the application of DNNs to Computer Vision (CV) tasks and presents a survey of the tools that support the black-box performance diagnosis paradigm. It illustrates the features and gaps of the current proposals, discusses the relevant research directions and provides a brief overview of the diagnosis tools in sectors other than CV.