COSTI: a New Classifier for Sequences of Temporal Intervals

Classification of sequences of temporal intervals is a part of time series analysis which concerns series of events. We propose a new method of transforming the problem to a task of multivariate series classification. We use one of the state-of-the-art algorithms from the latter domain on the new representation to obtain significantly better accuracy than the state-of-the-art methods from the former field. We discuss limitations of this workflow and address them by developing a novel method for classification termed COSTI (short for Classification of Sequences of Temporal Intervals) operating directly on sequences of temporal intervals. The proposed method remains at a high level of accuracy and obtains better performance while avoiding shortcomings connected to operating on transformed data. We propose a generalized version of the problem of classification of temporal intervals, where each event is supplemented with information about its intensity. We also provide two new data sets where this information is of substantial value.

Fuzzy Cognitive Maps and Hidden Markov Models: Comparative Analysis of Efficiency within the Confines of the Time Series Classification Task

Time series classification is one of the very popular machine learning tasks. In this paper, we explore the application of Hidden Markov Model (HMM) for time series classification. We distinguish between two modes of HMM application. The first, in which a single model is built for each class. The second, in which one HMM is built for each time series. We then transfer both approaches for classifier construction to the domain of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps. The identified four models, HMM NN (HMM, one per series), HMM 1C (HMM, one per class), FCM NN, and FCM 1C are then studied in a series of experiments. We compare the performance of different models and investigate the impact of their hyperparameters on the time series classification accuracy. The empirical evaluation shows a clear advantage of the one-model-per-series approach. The results show that the choice between HMM and FCM should be dataset-dependent.