8597170
Approximations to magic: finding unusual medical time series
In this work we introduce the new problem of finding time series discords. Time series discords are subsequences of longer time series that are maximally different to all the rest of the time series subsequences. They thus capture the sense of the most unusual subsequence within a time series. While the brute force algorithm to discover time series discords is quadratic in the length of the time series, we show a simple algorithm that is 3 to 4 orders of magnitude faster than brute force, while guaranteed to produce identical results.
1747696
HOT SAX: efficiently finding the most unusual time series subsequence
In this work, we introduce the new problem of finding time series discords. Time series discords are subsequences of a longer time series that are maximally different to all the rest of the time series subsequences. They thus capture the sense of the most unusual subsequence within a time series. Time series discords have many uses for data mining, including improving the quality of clustering, data cleaning, summarization, and anomaly detection. Discords are particularly attractive as anomaly detectors because they only require one intuitive parameter (the length of the subsequence) unlike most anomaly detection algorithms that typically require many parameters. We evaluate our work with a comprehensive set of experiments. In particular, we demonstrate the utility of discords with objective experiments on domains as diverse as Space Shuttle telemetry monitoring, medicine, surveillance, and industry, and we demonstrate the effectiveness of our discord discovery algorithm with more than one million experiments, on 82 different datasets from diverse domains.
6084733
A symbolic representation of time series, with implications for streaming algorithms
The parallel explosions of interest in streaming data, and data mining of time series have had surprisingly little intersection. This is in spite of the fact that time series data are typically streaming data. The main reason for this apparent paradox is the fact that the vast majority of work on streaming data explicitly assumes that the data is discrete, whereas the vast majority of time series data is real valued.Many researchers have also considered transforming real valued time series into symbolic representations, nothing that such representations would potentially allow researchers to avail of the wealth of data structures and algorithms from the text processing and bioinformatics communities, in addition to allowing formerly "batch-only" problems to be tackled by the streaming community. While many symbolic representations of time series have been introduced over the past decades, they all suffer from three fatal flaws. Firstly, the dimensionality of the symbolic representation is the same as the original data, and virtually all data mining algorithms scale poorly with dimensionality. Secondly, although distance measures can be defined on the symbolic approaches, these distance measures have little correlation with distance measures defined on the original time series. Finally, most of these symbolic approaches require one to have access to all the data, before creating the symbolic representation. This last feature explicitly thwarts efforts to use the representations with streaming algorithms.In this work we introduce a new symbolic representation of time series. Our representation is unique in that it allows dimensionality/numerosity reduction, and it also allows distance measures to be defined on the symbolic approach that lower bound corresponding distance measures defined on the original series. As we shall demonstrate, this latter feature is particularly exciting because it allows one to run certain data mining algorithms on the efficiently manipulated symbolic representation, while producing identical results to the algorithms that operate on the original data. Finally, our representation allows the real valued data to be converted in a streaming fashion, with only an infinitesimal time and space overhead.We will demonstrate the utility of our representation on the classic data mining tasks of clustering, classification, query by content and anomaly detection.
8822889
Iterative Incremental Clustering of Time Series
We present a novel anytime version of partitional clustering algorithm, such as k-Means and EM, for time series. The algorithm works by leveraging off the multi-resolution property of wavelets. The dilemma of choosing the initial centers is mitigated by initializing the centers at each approximation level, using the final centers returned by the coarser representations. In addition to casting the clustering algorithms as anytime algorithms, this approach has two other very desirable properties. By working at lower dimensionalities we can efficiently avoid local minima. Therefore, the quality of the clustering is usually better than the batch algorithm. In addition, even if the algorithm is run to completion, our approach is much faster than its batch counterpart. We explain, and empirically demonstrate these surprising and desirable properties with comprehensive experiments on several publicly available real data sets. We further demonstrate that our approach can be generalized to a framework of much broader range of algorithms or data mining problems.
5082006
Mining motifs in massive time series databases
The problem of efficiently locating previously known patterns in a time series database (i.e., query by content) has received much attention and may now largely be regarded as a solved problem. However, from a knowledge discovery viewpoint, a more interesting problem is the enumeration of previously unknown, frequently occurring patterns. We call such patterns "motifs", because of their close analogy to their discrete counterparts in computation biology. An efficient motif discovery algorithm for time series would be useful as a tool for summarizing and visualizing massive time series databases. In addition it could be used as a subroutine in various other data mining tasks, including the discovery of association rules, clustering and classification. In this paper we carefully motivate, then introduce, a nontrivial definition of time series motifs. We propose an efficient algorithm to discover them, and we demonstrate the utility and efficiency of our approach on several real world datasets.
16138730
Group SAX: Extending the Notion of Contrast Sets to Time Series and Multimedia Data
In this work, we take the traditional notation of contrast sets and extend them to other data types, in particular time series and by extension, images. In the traditional sense, contrast-set mining identifies attributes, values and instances that differ significantly across groups, and helps user understand the differences between groups of data. We reformulate the notion of contrast-sets for time series data, and define it to be the key pattern(s) that are maximally different from the other set of data. We propose a fast and exact algorithm to find the contrast sets, and demonstrate its utility in several diverse domains, ranging from industrial to anthropology. We show that our algorithm achieves 3 orders of magnitude speedup from the brute-force algorithm, while producing exact solutions.
11169177
Mining maximal frequent intervals
Many real world data are associated with intervals of time or distance. Mining frequent intervals from such data allows the users to group transactions with similar behavior together. Previous work only focuses on the problem of mining frequent intervals in a discrete domain. This paper first proposes the notion of maximal frequent intervals, which are superior to frequent intervals in many perspectives, and then provides a method for mining maximal frequent intervals in either a discrete domain or a continuous domain. Experimental results indicate that our method outperforms previous method for mining frequent intervals, and improves the runtime by two orders of magnitude for databases with a large number of distinct endpoints.
47470200
Multipurpose virtual-reality-based motion simulator
Public security has become an important issue everywhere. In particular, the safe manipulation and control of various machines and vehicles has gained special attention such that the authorities keep emphasizing the strict training and censoring of human operators. Currently, such training and censoring processes usually rely on the actual machines, equipment, or vehicles in the real sites. This not only has high demands in space, time and cost, but also causes another phase of public security problem. In connection with this, the world-wide trend is to tackle the above dilemma by using virtual reality (VR). However, the current VR research or products are more mature in the software display part of VR. How to combine a 3D VR display with a motion platform to achieve the aforementioned training and censoring purposes is an important research issue. The paper focuses on this research issue, and the goal is to develop a multipurpose virtual-reality-based motion simulation system to meet the requirements of public security in training and censoring of human operators.
12592432
User simulations for evaluating answers to question series
Recently, question series have become one focus of research in question answering. These series are comprised of individual factoid, list, and ''other'' questions organized around a central topic, and represent abstractions of user-system dialogs. Existing evaluation methodologies have yet to catch up with this richer task model, as they fail to take into account contextual dependencies and different user behaviors. This paper presents a novel simulation-based methodology for evaluating answers to question series that addresses some of these shortcomings. Using this methodology, we examine two different behavior models: a ''QA-styled'' user and an ''IR-styled'' user. Results suggest that an off-the-shelf document retrieval system is competitive with state-of-the-art QA systems in this task. Advantages and limitations of evaluations based on user simulations are also discussed.
22235434
The role of context in question answering systems
Despite recent advances in natural language question an-swering technology, the problem of designing effective user interfaces has been largely unexplored. We conducted a user study to investigate the problem and discovered that overall, users prefer a paragraph-sized chunk of text over just an exact phrase as the answer to their questions. Fur-thermore, users generally prefer answers embedded in con-text, regardless of the perceived reliability of the source documents. When users research a topic, increasing the amount of text returned to users significantly decreases the number of queries that they pose to the system, suggesting that users utilize supporting text to answer related ques-tions. We believe that these results can serve to guide future developments in question answering user interfaces.
15165046
A Classification Tree Based on Discriminant Functions
The classification problem is an important topic in knowledge discovery and machine learning. Traditional classification tree methods and their improvements have been discussed widely. This work proposes a new approach to construct decision trees based on discriminani functions which are learned using genetic programming. A discriminant function is a mathematical function for classifying data into a specific class. To learn discriminant functions effectively and efficiently, a distance-based fitness function for genetic programming is designed. After the set of discriminant functions for all classes is generated, a classifier is created as a binary decision tree with the Z-value measure to resolve the problem of ambiguity among discriminant functions. Several popular datasets from the UCI Repository were selected to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed classifiers by comparing with previous methods. The results show that the proposed classification tree demonstrates high accuracy on the selected datasets.