At the light of regularized dynamic time warping kernels, this paper reconsider the concept of time elastic centroid (TEC) for a set of time series. From this perspective, we show first how TEC can easily be addressed as a preimage problem. Unfortunately this preimage problem is ill-posed, may suffer from over-fitting especially for long time series and getting a sub-optimal solution involves heavy computational costs. We then derive two new algorithms based on a probabilistic interpretation of kernel alignment matrices that expresses in terms of probabilistic distributions over sets of alignment paths. The first algorithm is an iterative agglomerative heuristics inspired from the state of the art DTW barycenter averaging (DBA) algorithm proposed specifically for the Dynamic Time Warping measure. The second proposed algorithm achieves a classical averaging of the aligned samples but also implements an averaging of the time of occurrences of the aligned samples. It exploits a straightforward progressive agglomerative heuristics. An experimentation that compares for 45 time series datasets classification error rates obtained by first near neighbors classifiers exploiting a single medoid or centroid estimate to represent each categories show that: i) centroids based approaches significantly outperform medoids based approaches, ii) on the considered experience, the two proposed algorithms outperform the state of the art DBA algorithm, and iii) the second proposed algorithm that implements an averaging jointly in the sample space and along the time axes emerges as the most significantly robust time elastic averaging heuristic with an interesting noise reduction capability. Index Terms—Time series averaging Time elastic kernel Dynamic Time Warping Time series clustering and classification.
 It is shown that the multiple alignment problem with SP-score is NP-hard for each scoring matrix in a broad class M that includes most scoring matrices actually used in biological applications. The problem remains NP-hard even if sequences can only be shifted relative to each other and no internal gaps are allowed. It is also shown that there is a scoring matrix M0 such that the multiple alignment problem for M0 is MAX-SNP-hard, regardless of whether or not internal gaps are allowed. The study and comparison of sequences of characters from a finite alphabet is relevant to various areas of science, notably molecular biology. The measurement of sequence similarity involves the consideration of the different possible sequence alignments in order to find an optimal one for which the “distance” between sequences is minimum. By associating a path in a lattice to each alignment, a geometric insight can be brought into the problem of finding an optimal alignment. This problem can then be solved by applying a dynamic programming algorithm. However, the computational effort grows rapidly with the number N of sequences to be compared @math , where l is the mean length of the sequences to be compared).It is proved here that knowledge of the measure of an arbitrarily chosen alignment can be used in combination with information from the pairwise alignments to considerably restrict the size of the region of the lattice in consideration. This reduction implies fewer computations and less memory ... ABSTRACT We study the computational complexity of two popular problems in multiple sequence alignment: multiple alignment with SP-score and multiple tree alignment. It is shown that the first problem is NP-complete and the second is MAX SNP-hard. The complexity of tree alignment with a given phylogeny is also considered.