Early Anomaly Detection for UAV Flight Telemetry Using MTAD-GAT on the ALFA Dataset
This study applies MTAD-GAT to early anomaly detection in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flight telemetry using the ALFA fault dataset. Thirty-one telemetry variables are arranged as lookback windows, and a graph-attention architecture is used to jointly model inter-feature relationships and temporal dependencies. To keep the evaluation compact, we rely on three indicators: PR-AUC for timestep-level anomaly ranking, Flight AUROC for flight-level fault separation, and mean time-to-detection (TTD) for early-warning capability. Under the operational setting, MTAD-GAT achieves a PR-AUC of 0.5282, a Flight AUROC of 0.8889, and a mean TTD of 15.13 timesteps. The same setting also records the highest PR-AUC among the conventional unsupervised baselines, indicating that jointly modeling feature interactions and temporal context is beneficial for UAV fault detection. The contribution of this work is to reframe UAV anomaly detection not only as a timestep-level scoring task but also as a flight-level early-warning problem.