Finding repeated patterns or motifs in a time series is an important unsupervised task that has still a number of open issues, starting by the definition of motif. In this paper, we revise the notion of motif support, characterizing it as the number of patterns or repetitions that define a motif. We then propose GENMOTIF, a genetic algorithm to discover motifs with support which, at the same time, is flexible enough to accommodate other motif specifications and task characteristics. GENMOTIF is an anytime algorithm that easily adapts to many situations: searching in a range of segment lengths, applying uniform scaling, dealing with multiple dimensions, using different similarity and grouping criteria, etc. GENMOTIF is also parameter-friendly: it has only two intuitive parameters which, if set within reasonable bounds, do not substantially affect its performance. We demonstrate the value of our approach in a number of synthetic and real-world settings, considering traffic volume measurements, accelerometer signals, and telephone call records.
Other algorithms have been proposed for the task of time series subsequence clustering @cite_6 @cite_26 . Though this task and the one of finding motifs with support have common aspects, they are conceptually different. Time series subsequence clustering aims at obtaining a good and compact representation of the whole time series while, as shown in @cite_26 , ignoring some data. However, motif discovery aims at finding characteristic patterns (with support) that do not necessarily need to reliably and compactly represent the full time series. In fact, the segments used to derive the motifs can actually represent a tiny part of the time series (i.e., @math , as mentioned in the main text).
@cite_26 @cite_6
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Several important time series data mining problems reduce to the core task of finding approximately repeated subsequences in a longer time series. In an earlier work, we formalized the idea of approximately repeated subsequences by introducing the notion of time series motifs. Two limitations of this work were the poor scalability of the motif discovery algorithm, and the inability to discover motifs in the presence of noise.Here we address these limitations by introducing a novel algorithm inspired by recent advances in the problem of pattern discovery in biosequences. Our algorithm is probabilistic in nature, but as we show empirically and theoretically, it can find time series motifs with very high probability even in the presence of noise or "don't care" symbols. Not only is the algorithm fast, but it is an anytime algorithm, producing likely candidate motifs almost immediately, and gradually improving the quality of results over time. The problem of locating motifs in real-valued, multivariate time series data involves the discovery of sets of recurring patterns embedded in the time series. Each set is composed of several non-overlapping subsequences and constitutes a motif because all of the included subsequences are similar. The ability to automatically discover such motifs allows intelligent systems to form endogenously meaningful representations of their environment through unsupervised sensor analysis. In this paper, we formulate a unifying view of motif discovery as a problem of locating regions of high density in the space of all time series subsequences. Our approach is efficient (sub-quadratic in the length of the data), requires fewer user-specified parameters than previous methods, and naturally allows variable length motif occurrences and non-linear temporal warping. We evaluate the performance of our approach using four data sets from different domains including on-body inertial sensors and speech. In time series mining, one of the interesting tasks that attract many researchers is time series clustering which is classified into two main categories. Whole time series clustering considers how to cluster multiple time series, and the other one is Subsequence Time Series (STS) clustering, a clustering of subparts or subsequences within a single time series. Deplorably, STS clustering is not preferable even though it had widely been used as a subroutine in various mining tasks, e.g., rule discovery, anomaly detection, or classification, due to the recent finding a decade ago that STS clustering problem can produce meaningless results. There have been numerous attempts to resolve this problem but seemed to be unsuccessful. Until the two most recent attempts, they seem to accomplish in producing meaningful results; however, their approaches do need some predefined constraint values, such as the width of the subsequences that are in fact quite subjective and sensitive. Thus, we propose a novel parameter-free clustering technique to eliminate this problem by utilizing a motif discovery algorithm and some statistical principles to properly determine these parameters. Our experimental results from well-known datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in selecting the proper subsequence width, and in turn leading to meaningful and highly accurate results. Time series motifs are approximately repeating patterns in real-valued time series data. They are useful for exploratory data mining and are often used as inputs for various time series clustering, classification, segmentation, rule discovery, and visualization algorithms. Since the introduction of the first motif discovery algorithm for univariate time series in 2002, multiple efforts have been made to generalize motifs to the multidimensional case. In this work, we show that these efforts, which typically attempt to find motifs on all dimensions, will not produce meaningful motifs except in the most contrived situations. We explain this finding and introduce mSTAMP, an algorithm that allows meaningful discovery of multidimensional motifs. Beyond producing objectively and subjectively meaningful results, our algorithm has a host of additional advantages, including being much faster, requiring fewer parameters and supporting streaming data. We demonstrate the utility of our mSTAMP-based motif discovery framework on domains as diverse as audio processing, industry, and sports analytics.