Efficiently finding similar segments or motifs in time series data is a fundamental task that, due to the ubiquity of these data, is present in a wide range of domains and situations. Because of this, countless solutions have been devised but, to date, none of them seems to be fully satisfactory and flexible. In this article, we propose an innovative standpoint and present a solution coming from it: an anytime multimodal optimization algorithm for time series motif discovery based on particle swarms. By considering data from a variety of domains, we show that this solution is extremely competitive when compared to the state-of-the-art, obtaining comparable motifs in considerably less time using minimal memory. In addition, we show that it is robust to different implementation choices and see that it offers an unprecedented degree of flexibility with regard to the task. All these qualities make the presented solution stand out as one of the most prominent candidates for motif discovery in long time series streams. Besides, we believe the proposed standpoint can be exploited in further time series analysis and mining tasks, widening the scope of research and potentially yielding novel effective solutions.
One of the challenging questions in time series forecasting is how to find the best algorithm. In recent years, a recommender system scheme has been developed for time series analysis using a meta-learning approach. This system selects the best forecasting method with consideration of the time series characteristics. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to focusing on some of the unanswered questions resulting from the use of meta-learning in time series forecasting. Therefore, three main gaps in previous works are addressed including, analyzing various subsets of top forecasters as inputs for meta-learners; evaluating the effect of forecasting error measures; and assessing the role of the dimensionality of the feature space on the forecasting errors of meta-learners. All of these objectives are achieved with the help of a diverse state-of-the-art pool of forecasters and meta-learners. For this purpose, first, a pool of forecasting algorithms is implemented on the NN5 competition dataset and ranked based on the two error measures. Then, six machine-learning classifiers known as meta-learners, are trained on the extracted features of the time series in order to assign the most suitable forecasting method for the various subsets of the pool of forecasters. Furthermore, two-dimensionality reduction methods are implemented in order to investigate the role of feature space dimension on the performance of meta-learners. In general, it was found that meta-learners were able to defeat all of the individual benchmark forecasters; this performance was improved even after applying the feature selection method.
We consider nonnegative time series forecasting framework. Based on recent advances in Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) and Archetypal Analysis, we introduce two procedures referred to as Sliding Mask Method (SMM) and Latent Clustered Forecast (LCF). SMM is a simple and powerful method based on time window prediction using Completion of Nonnegative Matrices. This new procedure combines low nonnegative rank decomposition and matrix completion where the hidden values are to be forecasted. LCF is two stage: it leverages archetypal analysis for dimension reduction and clustering of time series, then it uses any black-box supervised forecast solver on the clustered latent representation. Theoretical guarantees on uniqueness and robustness of the solution of NMF Completion-type problems are also provided for the first time. Finally, numerical experiments on real-world and synthetic data-set confirms forecasting accuracy for both the methodologies.
Financial markets are a source of non-stationary multidimensional time series which has been drawing attention for decades. Each financial instrument has its specific changing over time properties, making their analysis a complex task. Improvement of understanding and development of methods for financial time series analysis is essential for successful operation on financial markets. In this study we propose a volume-based data pre-processing method for making financial time series more suitable for machine learning pipelines. We use a statistical approach for assessing the performance of the method. Namely, we formally state the hypotheses, set up associated classification tasks, compute effect sizes with confidence intervals, and run statistical tests to validate the hypotheses. We additionally assess the trading performance of the proposed method on historical data and compare it to a previously published approach. Our analysis shows that the proposed volume-based method allows successful classification of the financial time series patterns, and also leads to better classification performance than a price action-based method, excelling specifically on more liquid financial instruments. Finally, we propose an approach for obtaining feature interactions directly from tree-based models on example of CatBoost estimator, as well as formally assess the relatedness of the proposed approach and SHAP feature interactions with a positive outcome.
Financial markets are a source of non-stationary multidimensional time series which has been drawing attention for decades. Each financial instrument has its specific changing over time properties, making their analysis a complex task. Improvement of understanding and development of methods for financial time series analysis is essential for successful operation on financial markets. In this study we propose a volume-based data pre-processing method for making financial time series more suitable for machine learning pipelines. We use a statistical approach for assessing the performance of the method. Namely, we formally state the hypotheses, set up associated classification tasks, compute effect sizes with confidence intervals, and run statistical tests to validate the hypotheses. We additionally assess the trading performance of the proposed method on historical data and compare it to a previously published approach. Our analysis shows that the proposed volume-based method allows successful classification of the financial time series patterns, and also leads to better classification performance than a price action-based method, excelling specifically on more liquid financial instruments. Finally, we propose an approach for obtaining feature interactions directly from tree-based models on example of CatBoost estimator, as well as formally assess the relatedness of the proposed approach and SHAP feature interactions with a positive outcome.
We consider the problem of inferring the conditional independence graph (CIG) of a high-dimensional stationary multivariate Gaussian time series. In a time series graph, each component of the vector series is represented by distinct node, and associations between components are represented by edges between the corresponding nodes. We formulate the problem as one of multi-attribute graph estimation for random vectors where a vector is associated with each node of the graph. At each node, the associated random vector consists of a time series component and its delayed copies. We present an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) solution to minimize a sparse-group lasso penalized negative pseudo log-likelihood objective function to estimate the precision matrix of the random vector associated with the entire multi-attribute graph. The time series CIG is then inferred from the estimated precision matrix. A theoretical analysis is provided. Numerical results illustrate the proposed approach which outperforms existing frequency-domain approaches in correctly detecting the graph edges.
We provide a predictive analysis of the spread of COVID-19, also known as SARS-CoV-2, using the dataset made publicly available online by the Johns Hopkins University. Our main objective is to provide predictions for the number of infected people for different countries. The predictive analysis is done using time-series data transformed on a logarithmic scale. We use two well-known methods for prediction: polynomial regression and neural network. As the number of training data for each country is limited, we use a single-layer neural network called the extreme learning machine (ELM) to avoid over-fitting. Due to the non-stationary nature of the time-series, a sliding window approach is used to provide a more accurate prediction.
We develop a new method to detect anomalies within time series, which is essential in many application domains, reaching from self-driving cars, finance, and marketing to medical diagnosis and epidemiology. The method is based on self-supervised deep learning that has played a key role in facilitating deep anomaly detection on images, where powerful image transformations are available. However, such transformations are widely unavailable for time series. Addressing this, we develop Local Neural Transformations(LNT), a method learning local transformations of time series from data. The method produces an anomaly score for each time step and thus can be used to detect anomalies within time series. We prove in a theoretical analysis that our novel training objective is more suitable for transformation learning than previous deep Anomaly detection(AD) methods. Our experiments demonstrate that LNT can find anomalies in speech segments from the LibriSpeech data set and better detect interruptions to cyber-physical systems than previous work. Visualization of the learned transformations gives insight into the type of transformations that LNT learns.