While analyzing vehicular sensor data, we found that frequently occurring waveforms could serve as features for further analysis, such as rule mining, classification, and anomaly detection. The discovery of waveform patterns, also known as time-series motifs, has been studied extensively; however, available techniques for discovering frequently occurring time-series motifs were found lacking in either efficiency or quality: Standard subsequence clustering results in poor quality, to the extent that it has even been termed 'meaningless'. Variants of hierarchical clustering using techniques for efficient discovery of 'exact pair motifs' find high-quality frequent motifs, but at the cost of high computational complexity, making such techniques unusable for our voluminous vehicular sensor data. We show that good quality frequent motifs can be discovered using bounded spherical clustering of time-series subsequences, which we refer to as COIN clustering, with near linear complexity in time-series size. COIN clustering addresses many of the challenges that previously led to subsequence clustering being viewed as meaningless. We describe an end-to-end motif-discovery procedure using a sequence of pre and post-processing techniques that remove trivial-matches and shifted-motifs, which also plagued previous subsequence-clustering approaches. We demonstrate that our technique efficiently discovers frequent motifs in voluminous vehicular sensor data as well as in publicly available data sets.
The startling claim was made that sequential time series clustering is meaningless. This has important consequences for a significant amount of work in the literature, since such a claim invalidates this work's contribution. In this paper, we show that sequential time series clustering is not meaningless, and that the problem highlighted in these works stem from their use of the Euclidean distance metric as the distance measure in the subsequence vector space. As a solution, we consider quite a general class of time series, and propose a regime based on two types of similarity that can exist between subsequence vectors, which give rise naturally to an alternative distance measure to Euclidean distance in the subsequence vector space. We show that, using this alternative distance measure, sequential time series clustering can indeed be meaningful. We repeat a key experiment in the work on which the "meaningless" claim was based, and show that our method leads to a successful clustering outcome. 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.  Sequential time series clustering is a technique used to extract important features from time series data. The method can be shown to be the process of clustering in the delay-vector space formalism used in the Dynamical Systems literature. Recently, the startling claim was made that sequential time series clustering is meaningless. This has important consequences for a significant amount of work in the literature, since such a claim invalidates these work’s contribution. In this paper, we show that sequential time series clustering is not meaningless, and that the problem highlighted in these works stem from their use of the Euclidean distance metric as the distance measure in the delay-vector space. As a solution, we consider quite a general class of time series, and propose a regime based on two types of similarity that can exist between delay vectors, giving rise naturally to an alternative distance measure to Euclidean distance in the delay-vector space. We show that, using this alternative distance measure, sequential time series clustering can indeed be meaningful. We repeat a key experiment in the work on which the “meaningless” claim was based, and show that our method leads to a successful clustering outcome. Clustering time series data using the popular subsequence (STS) technique has been widely used in the data mining and wider communities. Recently the conclusion was made that it is meaningless, based on the findings that it produces (a) clustering outcomes for distinct time series that are not distinguishable from one another, and (b) cluster centroids that are smoothed. More recent work has since showed that (a) could be solved by introducing a lag in the subsequence vector construction process, however we show in this paper that such an approach does not solve (b). Motivating the terminology that a clustering method which overcomes (a) is meaningful, while one which overcomes (a) and (b) is useful, we propose an approach that produces useful time series clustering. The approach is based on restricting the clustering space to extend only over the region visited by the time series in the subsequence vector space. We test the approach on a set of 12 diverse real-world and synthetic data sets and find that (a) one can distinguish between the clusterings of these time series, and (b) that the centroids produced in each case retain the character of the underlying series from which they came.