Generative Adversarial Networks-enabled Anomaly Detection Systems: A Survey

Saeed, Umer; Jan, Sana Ullah; Ahmad, Jawad; Shah, Syed Aziz; Alshehri, Mohammed S.; Ghadi, Yazeed Yasin; Pitropakis, Nikolaos; Buchanan, William J.

Abstract

Anomaly Detection (AD) is an important area of research because it helps identify outliers in data, enabling early detection of errors, fraud, and potential security breaches. Machine Learning (ML) can be utilized for distinct AD systems, and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have emerged as a promising technique due to their ability to generate new data that closely resembles a given dataset, allowing for the creation of realistic images, videos, audio, text, and other types of synthetic data. This paper explores state-of-the-art approaches in AD using GANs. The paper starts by providing a comprehensive overview of ML techniques for AD, including supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised approaches. This survey also explores various AD approaches based on GANs and provides an application-based classification of GANs-based AD approaches in the Internet-of-Things (IoT), Industrial IoT, Digital Healthcare, Energy Management Systems, and Cellular Network domains. Moreover, the paper discusses several datasets used in evaluating the performance of GANs-based AD techniques such as BOT-IoT, TON-IoT, CIC-IoT, CIC-IDS, and NSL-KDD. These datasets serve as valuable resources for researchers and practitioners to develop and test AD systems, particularly in the context of IoT and network security. Furthermore, the paper discusses the challenges and limitations of GANs-based AD techniques and proposes future research directions to address these challenges.

Citation

Saeed, U., Jan, S. U., Ahmad, J., Shah, S. A., Alshehri, M. S., Ghadi, Y. Y., Pitropakis, N., & Buchanan, W. J. (2026). Generative Adversarial Networks-enabled Anomaly Detection Systems: A Survey. Expert Systems with Applications, 296(B), Article 128978. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2025.128978

• Journal Article Type: Review
• Acceptance Date: Jul 8, 2025
• Online Publication Date: Jul 10, 2025
• Publication Date: Jan 15, 2026
• Deposit Date: Jul 16, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 16, 2025
• Journal: Expert Systems with Applications
• Print ISSN: 0957-4174
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 296
• Issue: B
• Article Number: 128978
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2025.128978
• Keywords: GANs, Deep learning, Adversarial learning, Anomaly detection, Intrusion detection, Artificial intelligence