In this paper, an approach is proposed for the detection of abnormal time series subsequences using
the One-Class SVM with an application to defect detection of two automatic welding processes. The
One Class-SVM has been used in many works for the same purpose but only after transforming the
subsequences into a set of feature vectors. However, finding the relevant features that allow anomaly
detection may be challenging. Methods dealing with the raw subsequences, on the other hand, can be
easily generalized to other problems and are known to be efficient. Nevertheless, they often suffer from
high computational cost since they involve computing the distances to all the reference subsequences,
which may restrict their application, especially with the need of real time predictions in most of the
applications. We show in this work that, contrary to what is indicated in the literature, the One-
Class SVM can be used directly with the raw subsequences. This is achieved by employing distance
substitution kernels, which are a class of kernels that allow to use dissimilarity measures in the
One-class SVM formulation. The results show that the approach has a similar efficiency of those
suggested in the literature that operate with raw subsequences in terms of accuracy. Furthermore,
because it just requires the distances to the support vectors, the approach has a low time complexity
in the prediction phase, making it more suitable for real-time monitoring. We further show that the
One-Class SVM with non-metric dissimilarity remains efficient for aberrant subsequence identification.