Multivariate time series (MTS) arise when multiple interconnected sensors record data over time. Dealing with this high-dimensional data is challenging for every classifier for at least two aspects: First, a MTS is not only characterized by individual feature values, but also by the co-occurrence of features in different dimensions. Second, this typically adds large amounts of irrelevant data and noise. We present our novel MTS classifier WEASEL+MUSE (Word ExtrAction for time SEries cLassification + MUltivariate Symbols and dErivatives) which addresses both challenges. WEASEL+MUSE builds a multivariate feature vector, first using a sliding-window approach applied to each dimension of the MTS, then extracts discrete features per window and dimension. The feature vector is subsequently fed through feature selection, removing non-discriminative features, and analysed by a machine learning classifier. The novelty of WEASEL+MUSE lies in its specific way of extracting and filtering multivariate features from MTS by encoding context information into each feature, resulting in a small, yet very discriminative feature set useful for MTS classification. Based on a popular benchmark of @math MTS datasets, we found that WEASEL+MUSE is the most accurate domain agnostic classifier, when compared to the state of the art. The outstanding robustness of WEASEL+MUSE is further confirmed based on motion gesture recognition data, where it out-of-the-box achieved similar accuracies as domain-specific methods.
@cite_14 uses codebook learning and the bag-of-words (BOW) model for classification. First, a random forest is trained on the raw MTS to partition the MTS into leaf nodes. Each leaf node is then labelled by a word of a codebook. There is no additional feature extraction, apart from calculating derivatives for the numerical dimensions (first order differences). For classification a second random forest is trained on the BOW representation of all MTS.
@cite_14
2066224818
Multivariate time series (MTS) classification has gained importance with the increase in the number of temporal datasets in different domains (such as medicine, finance, multimedia, etc.). Similarity-based approaches, such as nearest-neighbor classifiers, are often used for univariate time series, but MTS are characterized not only by individual attributes, but also by their relationships. Here we provide a classifier based on a new symbolic representation for MTS (denoted as SMTS) with several important elements. SMTS considers all attributes of MTS simultaneously, rather than separately, to extract information contained in the relationships. Symbols are learned from a supervised algorithm that does not require pre-defined intervals, nor features. An elementary representation is used that consists of the time index, and the values (and first differences for numerical attributes) of the individual time series as columns. That is, there is essentially no feature extraction (aside from first differences) and the local series values are fused to time position through the time index. The initial representation of raw data is quite simple conceptually and operationally. Still, a tree-based ensemble can detect interactions in the space of the time index and time values and this is exploited to generate a high-dimensional codebook from the terminal nodes of the trees. Because the time index is included as an attribute, each MTS is learned to be segmented by time, or by the value of one of its attributes. The codebook is processed with a second ensemble where now implicit feature selection is exploited to handle the high-dimensional input. The constituent properties produce a distinctly different algorithm. Moreover, MTS with nominal and missing values are handled efficiently with tree learners. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of accuracy and computation times in a large collection multivariate (and univariate) datasets.