Benchmarking Multivariate Time Series Classification Algorithms

Time Series Classification (TSC) involved building predictive models for a discrete target variable from ordered, real valued, attributes. Over recent years, a new set of TSC algorithms have been developed which have made significant improvement over the previous state of the art. The main focus has been on univariate TSC, i.e. the problem where each case has a single series and a class label. In reality, it is more common to encounter multivariate TSC (MTSC) problems where multiple series are associated with a single label. Despite this, much less consideration has been given to MTSC than the univariate case. The UEA archive of 30 MTSC problems released in 2018 has made comparison of algorithms easier. We review recently proposed bespoke MTSC algorithms based on deep learning, shapelets and bag of words approaches. The simplest approach to MTSC is to ensemble univariate classifiers over the multivariate dimensions. We compare the bespoke algorithms to these dimension independent approaches on the 26 of the 30 MTSC archive problems where the data are all of equal length. We demonstrate that the independent ensemble of HIVE-COTE classifiers is the most accurate, but that, unlike with univariate classification, dynamic time warping is still competitive at MTSC.Comment: Data Min Knowl Disc (2020

A multi-granularity pattern-based sequence classification framework for educational data

In many application domains, such as education, sequences of events occurring over time need to be studied in order to understand the generative process behind these sequences, and hence classify new examples. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-granularity sequence lassification framework that generates features based on frequent patterns at multiple levels of time granularity. Feature selection techniques are applied to identify the most informative features that are then used to construct the classification model. We show the applicability and suitability of the proposed framework to the area of educational data mining by experimenting on an educational dataset collected from an asynchronous communication tool in which students interact to accomplish an underlying group project. The experimental results showed that our model can achieve competitive performance in detecting the students' roles in their corresponding projects, compared to a baseline similarity-based approach

Shapelet Transforms for Univariate and Multivariate Time Series Classification

Time Series Classification (TSC) is a growing field of machine learning research. One particular algorithm from the TSC literature is the Shapelet Transform (ST). Shapelets are a phase independent subsequences that are extracted from times series to form discriminatory features. It has been shown that using the shapelets to transform the datasets into a new space can improve performance. One of the major problems with ST, is that the algorithm is O(n2m4), where n is the number of time series and m is the length of the series. As a problem increases in sizes, or additional dimensions are added, the algorithm quickly becomes computationally infeasible. The research question addressed is whether the shapelet transform be improved in terms of accuracy and speed. Making algorithmic improvements to shapelets will enable the development of multivariate shapelet algorithms that can attempt to solve much larger problems in realistic time frames. In support of this thesis a new distance early abandon method is proposed. A class balancing algorithm is implemented, which uses a one vs. all multi class information gain that enables heuristics which were developed for two class problems. To support these improvements a large scale analysis of the best shapelet algorithms is conducted as part of a larger experimental evaluation. ST is proven to be one of the most accurate algorithms in TSC on the UCR-UEA datasets. Contract classification is proposed for shapelets, where a fixed run time is set, and the number of shapelets is bounded. Four search algorithms are evaluated with fixed run times of one hour and one day, three of which are not significantly worse than a full enumeration. Finally, three multivariate shapelet algorithms are developed and compared to benchmark results and multivariate dynamic time warping