anomaly-detection-time-serieslisted
Install: claude install-skill clamp-sh/analytics-skills
# Anomaly detection for time series
The fingerprint library in `traffic-change-diagnosis` is a fast first pass: it pattern-matches the *shape* of a drop against twelve common causes. It is right most of the time and wrong when it matters most — when two fingerprints fit the same shape, when the user's eyeballed change date is off by a day, or when a counterfactual baseline is needed instead of a slope match. This skill adds six formal methods that resolve those cases. None of them replace the fingerprints; they adjudicate when fingerprints conflict.
## When NOT to use this
- The fingerprint match is unambiguous (single hypothesis, >0.7 confidence in the diagnosis worksheet). Running STL or BOCD on a clean tracking-regression drop is ceremony.
- The series is shorter than 14 days. STL needs at least two full seasonal cycles; BOCD's posterior is noisy with less than ~30 observations; Prophet needs more history than that to fit changepoints. For short series, stick to `analytics-diagnostic-method`'s denominator + sample-size discipline.
- The user wants a real-time alert on a single metric and hasn't already decided what "anomalous" means. That's a monitoring-design conversation, not a detection method; load `sequential-monitoring` instead.
- The metric is count-based with most days at zero (e.g. a niche conversion event). STL and Prophet assume continuous-ish residuals; you'll get nonsense decompositions. Use Poisson-tail tests instead.
## Pick one method per question
Do n