A Feature Segment Based Time Series Classification Algorithm

Time series classification (TSC) is a challenging task that attracted many researchers in the last few years. One main challenge in TSC is the diversity of domains where time series data come from. Thus, there is no “one model that fits all” in TSC. Some algorithms are very accurate in classifying a specific type of time series when the whole series is considered, while some only target the existence/non-existence of specific patterns/shapelets. Yet other techniques focus on the frequency of occurrences of discriminating patterns/features. This paper presents a new classification technique that addresses the inherent diversity problem in TSC using a nature-inspired method. The technique is stimulated by how flies look at the world through “compound eyes” that are made up of thousands of lenses, called ommatidia. Each ommatidium is an eye with its own lens, and thousands of them together create a broad field of vision. The developed technique similarly uses different lenses and representations to look at the time series, and then combines them for broader visibility. These lenses have been created through hyper-parameterisation of symbolic representations (Piecewise Aggregate and Fourier approximations). The algorithm builds a random forest for each lens, then performs soft dynamic voting for classifying new instances using the most confident eyes, i.e., forests. We evaluate the new technique, coined Co-eye, using the recently released extended version of UCR archive, containing more than 100 datasets across a wide range of domains. The results show the benefits of bringing together different perspectives reflecting on the accuracy and robustness of Co-eye in comparison to other state-of-the-art techniques.

Classification of time series has attracted substantial interest over past decades. Methods based on Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), Symbolic Aggregate approXimation (SAX) and Shapelets are widely used and have achieved success in various real-world scenarios. However most existing time series classification methods either focus on global variation (e.g. DTW, SAX) or local variation (e.g. Shapelets). In this paper, we propose a Multi-Grained Ensemble Method for time series classification (MEGoT), which can make use of the variation of multi-grained data at the same time. In MEGoT, unstable base learners (Neural Networks) are assigned different weights to combine the ensemble. Different learners represent the learning features of different subsequences in time series, which can discover the discriminative regions, providing interpretability for classification. The training process of MGEoT is simpler and apt to parallel implementation. In the experiments, we conduct empirical evaluations and comparisons with various existing methods on 25 benchmark datasets. The final results show that dividing samples into smaller granularity is able to improve the diversity of ensemble, and MGEoT is competitive in accuracy under the Nemenyi test. Furthermore, MGEoT can discover the discriminative regions in time series, which may be neglected in the global methods.

In the past decade, time series data have been generated from various fields at a rapid speed, which offers a huge opportunity for mining valuable knowledge. As a typical task of time series mining, Time Series Classification (TSC) has attracted lots of attention from both researchers and domain experts due to its broad applications ranging from human activity recognition to smart city governance. Specifically, there is an increasing requirement for performing classification tasks on diverse types of time series data in a timely manner without costly hand-crafting feature engineering. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a framework named Edge4TSC that allows time series to be processed in the edge environment, so that the classification results can be instantly returned to the end-users. Meanwhile, to get rid of the costly hand-crafting feature engineering process, deep learning techniques are applied for automatic feature extraction, which shows competitive or even superior performance compared to state-of-the-art TSC solutions. However, because time series presents complex patterns, even deep learning models are not capable of achieving satisfactory classification accuracy, which motivated us to explore new time series representation methods to help classifiers further improve the classification accuracy. In the proposed framework Edge4TSC, by building the binary distribution tree, a new time series representation method was designed for addressing the classification accuracy concern in TSC tasks. By conducting comprehensive experiments on six challenging time series datasets in the edge environment, the potential of the proposed framework for its generalization ability and classification accuracy improvement is firmly validated with a number of helpful insights.

Well-testing model identification using time-series shapelets

Time series classification is important due to its pervasive applications, especially for the emerging Smart City applications that are driven by intelligent sensors. Shapelets are sub-sequences of time series that have highly predictive abilities, and time series represented by shapelets can better reveal the patterns thus have better classification accuracy. Finding shapelets is challenging as its computational in-feasibility, most existing methods only finds shapelets with a same length or a few fixed length shapelets because the searching space of shapelets with arbitrary length is too large. In this paper, we improve the time series classification accuracy by discovering shapelets with arbitrary lengths. We borrow the idea of Apriori algorithm in association rule learning, that is, the superset shapelet candidates of a poor predictive shapelet candidate also have poor predictive abilities. Therefore, we propose a Flexible Shapelets Discovery (FSD) algorithm to discover shapelets with varying lengths. In FSD, shapelet candidates having the lower bound of length are discovered, and then we extend them into arbitrary lengths shapelets as long as their predictive abilities increases. Experiments conducted on 6 UCR time series datasets demonstrate that the arbitrary length shapelets discovered by FSD achieves better classification accuracy than those using fixed length shapelets.

Classification of time series is an essential requirement of various applications that demand continuous monitoring of dynamical systems such as industrial process and health care monitoring. Feature extraction plays a vital role in deciding performance of the time series models. In recent years deep learning techniques have shown an excellent performance to extract highly discriminating features for the classification of the time series. A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is a unified framework that performs the feature learning and classification tasks simultaneously. Using the CNN to perform the classification of the multivariate time series is still a challenging task. In this paper, we propose an attention-based multivariate convolutional neural network (AT-MVCNN) that consists of the attention feature-based input tensor scheme to encode informations across the multiple time stamps. The method is capable of learning the temporal characteristics of the multivariate time series. The efficacy of the proposed method is tested on Human Activity Recognition (HAR) and Occupancy Detection datasets. The experiments and results show the proposed method outperforms the other deep learning and traditional machine learning models.

The increased availability of time series datasets prompts the development of new tools and methods that allow machine learning classifiers to better cope with time series data. Time series data are usually characterized by a high space dimensionality and a very strong correlation among features. This special nature makes the development of effective time series classifiers a challenging task. This work proposes and analyzes methods combining spectral decomposition and feature selection for time series classification problems and compares them against methods that work with original time series and time-dependent features. Briefly, our approach first applies discrete cosine transform (DCT) or discrete wavelet transform (DWT) on time series data. Then, it performs supervised feature selection/reduction by selecting only the most discriminative set of coefficients to represent the data. Experimental evaluations, carried out on multiple datasets, demonstrate the benefits of our approach in learning efficient and accurate time series classifiers.

Time Series Classification (TSC) is an important and challenging problem in data mining. With the increase of time series data availability, hundreds of TSC algorithms have been proposed. Among these methods, only a few have considered Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to perform this task. This is surprising as deep learning has seen very successful applications in the last years. DNNs have indeed revolutionized the field of computer vision especially with the advent of novel deeper architectures such as Residual and Convolutional Neural Networks. Apart from images, sequential data such as text and audio can also be processed with DNNs to reach state-of-the-art performance for document classification and speech recognition. In this article, we study the current state-of-the-art performance of deep learning algorithms for TSC by presenting an empirical study of the most recent DNN architectures for TSC. We give an overview of the most successful deep learning applications in various time series domains under a unified taxonomy of DNNs for TSC. We also provide an open source deep learning framework to the TSC community where we implemented each of the compared approaches and evaluated them on a univariate TSC benchmark (the UCR/UEA archive) and 12 multivariate time series datasets. By training 8,730 deep learning models on 97 time series datasets, we propose the most exhaustive study of DNNs for TSC to date.

Time-series classification (TSC) problems present a specific challenge for classification algorithms: how to measure similarity between series. A shapelet is a time-series subsequence that allows for TSC based on local, phase-independent similarity in shape. Shapelet-based classification uses the similarity between a shapelet and a series as a discriminatory feature. One benefit of the shapelet approach is that shapelets are comprehensible, and can offer insight into the problem domain. The original shapelet-based classifier embeds the shapelet-discovery algorithm in a decision tree, and uses information gain to assess the quality of candidates, finding a new shapelet at each node of the tree through an enumerative search. Subsequent research has focused mainly on techniques to speed up the search. We examine how best to use the shapelet primitive to construct classifiers. We propose a single-scan shapelet algorithm that finds the best $$k$$ k shapelets, which are used to produce a transformed dataset, where each of the $$k$$ k features represent the distance between a time series and a shapelet. The primary advantages over the embedded approach are that the transformed data can be used in conjunction with any classifier, and that there is no recursive search for shapelets. We demonstrate that the transformed data, in conjunction with more complex classifiers, gives greater accuracy than the embedded shapelet tree. We also evaluate three similarity measures that produce equivalent results to information gain in less time. Finally, we show that by conducting post-transform clustering of shapelets, we can enhance the interpretability of the transformed data. We conduct our experiments on 29 datasets: 17 from the UCR repository, and 12 we provide ourselves.

As a fundamental task in modern data mining, time series classification is powering mission-critical tasks including stock price prediction and network traffic analysis. Due to the non-linear structure of deep neural networks (DNN), deep learning has established as a promising solution to time series classification. However, the excessive learning capacity of DNNs may make them prone to threats of backdoor attacks, where an attacker embeds hidden functionalities (i.e., backdoor) to DNNs and activates the backdoor by specially-designed inputs (i.e., triggers). Despite extensive studies concerning backdoor attacks on image and text domains, there is little known about the vulnerability of DNN based time series classifiers against backdoor attacks. Due to the unique characteristics of time series data, most existing backdoor attack techniques fail to threaten time series classifiers. In this paper, through analyzing the key factors which influence the effectiveness of a backdoor, we systematize a list of practical principles for designing triggers on time series data. In this light, we propose a novel framework called TimeTrojan, which aims to learn to form the trigger pattern through a constrained multi-objective optimization. To solve the hereafter challenging optimization issue, we further design an iterative learning algorithm. Remarkably, the proposed framework is agnostic to a wide range of DNN classifiers. Extensive empirical results on 6 representative DNN classifiers and 6 real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed attack framework. In most cases, TimeTrojan successfully injects backdoors with 100% attack success rate without affecting the model accuracy on clean samples, which implies the complete control of the behavior of the DNN classifiers by the adversary.

A shapelet is a time-series subsequence that can represent local, phase-independent similarity in shape. Time series classification with subsequences can save computing cost, improve computing speed and improve algorithm accuracy. The shapelet-based approaches for time series classification have an advantage of interpretability. Concentrating on uncertain time series, this paper tries to apply the shapelet-based method to classify uncertain time series. Due to the high dimensions of time series, the number of the generated candidate shapelets is generally huge. As a result, the calculation amount is large too. To deal with this problem, in this paper, we introduce a piecewise linear representation (PLR) method for uncertain time series based on key points so that the traditional shapelet discovery algorithm can be improved efficiently. We verify our approach with experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed shapelet algorithm can be used for uncertain time series and it can provide classification accuracy well while reducing time cost.

The study is concerned with a concept and a design of granular time series and granular classifiers. In contrast to the plethora of various models of time series, which are predominantly numeric, we propose to effectively exploit the idea of information granules in the description and classification of time series. The numeric (optimization-oriented) and interpretation abilities of granular time series and their classifiers are highlighted and quantified. A general topology of the granular classifier involving a formation of a granular feature space and the usage of the framework of relational structures (relational equations) in the realization of the classifiers is presented. A detailed design process is elaborated on along with a discussion of the pertinent optimization mechanisms. A series of experiments is covered leading to a quantitative assessment of the granular classifiers and their parametric analysis.

Time series data produced from various sensors are mostly different from each other in length due to various environment of collection. Most time series classification methods, however, assume that the lengths of time series data are the same. There is no alternative, moreover, for variant-length time series classification except DTW and DTW-related methods and few researches on transformation of time series length can be found in direct ways. In this paper, we propose a length transformation method for effective variant-length time series classification. Proposed method is a similarity-preserving transformation and the restoration is possible. To evaluate the proposed method, experiments are conducted to compare the classification performance by applying well-known methods to the time series data before and after the transformation. The classification using the dataset transformed by the proposed method shows better performance on almost all measurements.

Active learning has been widely used to select the most informative data for labeling in classification tasks, except for time series classification. The main challenge of active learning in time series classification is to evaluate the informativeness of a time series instance. Specifically, many informativeness metrics have been proposed for traditional active learning, however, none of them is particularly effective on time series data. In this paper, we design an informativeness metric that considers the characteristics of time series data in defining our instance uncertainty and utility. We prove that our informativeness metric is a submodular set function, and further develop an effective and efficient algorithm to select the most informative time series instances for training. In the experiment, we validate our method on a variety of datasets in the UCR Time Series Data Archive. The results show that our method achieves a higher classification accuracy than existing methods, using only 50% of the training instances.

Time series classification is one of the most active research topics in time series data mining, because it covers a broad range of applications in many different domains. Representation for time series is a technique that converts time series to feature vectors representing the characteristics of time series. The performance of classifying time series depends on this representation. Chaotic time series analyses have been well-studied. Moreover, recurrence plotting underlying chaos theory is one of the most robust representation for time series. In this study, we propose a new time series representation utilising the recurrence plot technique. Moving average convergence divergence (MACD) histogram is the acceleration of time that can represent local-variation in time series. Therefore, a recurrence plot that is made from MACD histogram, which is called a MACD-histogram-based recurrence plot (MHRP), can handle time series very well. Recurrence plots are referred to as grey-scale images and we utilise stacked auto-encoders as a classifier for MHRPs. To evaluate the performance of the proposed classifier, experiments using the UCR time series classification archive was conducted. The experimental results showed that the proposed classifier outperforms other methods.