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 efficiently locating previously known patterns in a time series database (i.e., query by content) has received much attention and may now largely be regarded as a solved problem. However, from a knowledge discovery viewpoint, a more interesting problem is the enumeration of previously unknown, frequently occurring patterns. We call such patterns "motifs," because of their close analogy to their discrete counterparts in computation biology. An efficient motif discovery algorithm for time series would be useful as a tool for summarizing and visualizing massive time series databases. In addition, it could be used as a subroutine in various other data mining tasks, including the discovery of association rules, clustering and classification. In this work we carefully motivate, then introduce, a non-trivial definition of time series motifs. We propose an efficient algorithm to discover them, and we demonstrate the utility and efficiency of our approach on several real world datasets.

The problem of efficiently locating previously known patterns in a time series database (i.e., query by content) has received much attention and may now largely be regarded as a solved problem. However, from a knowledge discovery viewpoint, a more interesting problem is the enumeration of previously unknown, frequently occurring patterns. We call such patterns "motifs", because of their close analogy to their discrete counterparts in computation biology. An efficient motif discovery algorithm for time series would be useful as a tool for summarizing and visualizing massive time series databases. In addition it could be used as a subroutine in various other data mining tasks, including the discovery of association rules, clustering and classification.

The increasing interest in time series data mining in the last decade has resulted in the introduction of a variety of similarity measures, representations and algorithms. Surprisingly, this massive research effort has had little impact on real world applications. Real world practitioners who work with time series on a daily basis rarely take advantage of the wealth of tools that the data mining community has made available. In this work we attempt to address this problem by introducing a simple parameter-light tool that allows users to efficiently navigate through large collections of time series. Our system has the unique advantage that it can be embedded directly into the any standard graphical user interface, such as Microsoft Windows, thus making deployment easier. Our approach extracts features from a time series of arbitrary length, and uses information about the relative frequency of its features to color a bitmap in a principled way. By visualizing the similarities and differences within a collection of bitmaps, a user can quickly discover clusters, anomalies, and other regularities within their data collection. We demonstrate the utility of our approach with a set of comprehensive experiments on real datasets from a variety of domains.

Among the visual features of multimedia content, shape is of particular interest because humans can often recognize objects solely on the basis of shape. Over the past three decades, there has been a great deal of research on shape analysis, focusing mostly on shape indexing, clustering, and classification. In this work, we introduce the new problem of finding shape discords, the most unusual shapes in a collection. We motivate the problem by considering the utility of shape discords in diverse domains including zoology, anthropology, and medicine. While the brute force search algorithm has quadratic time complexity, we avoid this by using locality-sensitive hashing to estimate similarity between shapes which enables us to reorder the search more efficiently. An extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that our approach can speed up computation by three to four orders of magnitude.

The increasing interest in time series data mining in the last decade has had surprisingly little impact on real world medical applications. Real world practitioners who work with time series on a daily basis rarely take advantage of the wealth of tools that the data mining community has made available. In this work, we attempt to address this problem by introducing a simple parameter-light tool that allows users to efficiently navigate through large collections of time series. Our system has the unique advantage that it can be embedded directly into any standard graphical user interfaces, such as Microsoft Windows, thus making deployment easier. Our approach extracts features from a time series of arbitrary length and uses information about the relative frequency of these features to color a bitmap in a principled way. By visualizing the similarities and differences within a collection of bitmaps, a user can quickly discover clusters, anomalies, and other regularities within their data collection. We demonstrate the utility of our approach with a set of comprehensive experiments on real datasets from a variety of medical domains, including ECGs and EEGs.

The parallel explosions of interest in streaming data, and data mining of time series have had surprisingly little intersection. This is in spite of the fact that time series data are typically streaming data. The main reason for this apparent paradox is the fact that the vast majority of work on streaming data explicitly assumes that the data is discrete, whereas the vast majority of time series data is real valued. Many researchers