Clustering is ubiquitous in data analysis, including analysis of time series. It is inherently subjective: different users may prefer different clusterings for a particular dataset. Semi-supervised clustering addresses this by allowing the user to provide examples of instances that should (not) be in the same cluster. This paper studies semi-supervised clustering in the context of time series. We show that COBRAS, a state-of-the-art active semi-supervised clustering method, can be adapted to this setting. We refer to this approach as COBRASTS. An extensive experimental evaluation supports the following claims: (1) COBRASTS far outperforms the current state of the art in semi-supervised clustering for time series, and thus presents a new baseline for the field; (2) COBRASTS can identify clusters with separated components; (3) COBRASTS can identify clusters that are characterized by small local patterns; (4) actively querying a small amount of semi-supervision can greatly improve clustering quality for time series; (5) the choice of the clustering algorithm matters (contrary to earlier claims in the literature).
In contrast to the wealth of papers on semi-supervised clustering of attribute-value data, only one method has been proposed specifically for semi-supervised time series clustering. cDTW SS @cite_14 uses pairwise constraints to tune the warping width parameter @math in constrained DTW. cDTW SS is also an active clustering method, as it comes with a strategy to select the pairwise queries that are most informative for tuning @math . We compare COBRAS TS to this method in the experiments.
@cite_14
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The research community seems to have converged in agreement that for time series classification problems, Dynamic Time Warping (DTW)-based nearest-neighbor classifiers are exceptionally hard to beat. Obtaining the best performance from DTW requires setting its only parameter, the warping window width (w). This is typically set by cross validation in the training stage. However, for clustering, by definition we do not have access to such labeled data. This issue seems to have been largely ignored in the literature, with many practitioners simply assuming that "the larger the better" for the value of w, and using as large a value of w as computational resources permit. In this work we show that this is a naive approach which in most circumstances produces inferior clusterings. To address this problem, we introduce a novel semi-supervised technique that allows us to set the best value of w. Unlike virtually all other semi-supervised techniques, our ideas are completely independent of the clustering algorithm used, and can be utilized to improve time series clustering under partitional, hierarchical, spectral or density-based clustering. Our approach requires very little human intervention; moreover, we show that in many cases, true human annotation efforts can be replaced with automatically-generated "pseudo" supervision information. We demonstrate our technique by testing with more than one hundred publicly available datasets. Dynamic time warping (DTW), which finds the minimum path by providing non-linear alignments between two time series, has been widely used as a distance measure for time series classification and clustering. However, DTW does not account for the relative importance regarding the phase difference between a reference point and a testing point. This may lead to misclassification especially in applications where the shape similarity between two sequences is a major consideration for an accurate recognition. Therefore, we propose a novel distance measure, called a weighted DTW (WDTW), which is a penalty-based DTW. Our approach penalizes points with higher phase difference between a reference point and a testing point in order to prevent minimum distance distortion caused by outliers. The rationale underlying the proposed distance measure is demonstrated with some illustrative examples. A new weight function, called the modified logistic weight function (MLWF), is also proposed to systematically assign weights as a function of the phase difference between a reference point and a testing point. By applying different weights to adjacent points, the proposed algorithm can enhance the detection of similarity between two time series. We show that some popular distance measures such as DTW and Euclidean distance are special cases of our proposed WDTW measure. We extend the proposed idea to other variants of DTW such as derivative dynamic time warping (DDTW) and propose the weighted version of DDTW. We have compared the performances of our proposed procedures with other popular approaches using public data sets available through the UCR Time Series Data Mining Archive for both time series classification and clustering problems. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approaches can achieve improved accuracy for time series classification and clustering problems. In the research field of time series analysis, dynamic time warping distance (DTW) is a prevalent similarity measure with high precision. However, the computational complexity of DTW is high, which makes it difficult to be applied to the high dimensional time series. An effective solution is to compute DTW on the piecewise representation (PR-DTW), which employs the features of the subsequences of time series for similarity measure. However, the features that most existing piecewise representations focus on are too simple, which capture only one aspect of the fluctuation information of time series, and thus influence the precision of PR-DTW. In order to solve this problem, we propose a novel piecewise representation model, named piecewise statistic approximation (PSA), for supporting the PR-DTW measure. Rather than focusing on a single type of features, PSA extracts multiple statistical features to capture the synthetic fluctuation information for similarity measure. Besides, by taking the weighted Euclidean distance for the subsequence matching in the subroutine, PSA based DTW (PSADTW) can discriminate the expressivities of the multiple features. Comprehensive experiments over 45 real-world datasets empirically demonstrate that, PSA is well suited to support both precise and efficient PR-DTW measure. Semi-supervised clustering uses a small amount of supervised data to aid unsupervised learning. One typical approach specifies a limited number of must-link and cannotlink constraints between pairs of examples. This paper presents a pairwise constrained clustering framework and a new method for actively selecting informative pairwise constraints to get improved clustering performance. The clustering and active learning methods are both easily scalable to large datasets, and can handle very high dimensional data. Experimental and theoretical results confirm that this active querying of pairwise constraints significantly improves the accuracy of clustering when given a relatively small amount of supervision.