text: Finding repeated patterns or motifs in a time series is an important unsupervised task that has still a number of open issues, starting by the definition of motif. In this paper, we revise the notion of motif support, characterizing it as the number of patterns or repetitions that define a motif. We then propose GENMOTIF, a genetic algorithm to discover motifs with support which, at the same time, is flexible enough to accommodate other motif specifications and task characteristics. GENMOTIF is an anytime algorithm that easily adapts to many situations: searching in a range of segment lengths, applying uniform scaling, dealing with multiple dimensions, using different similarity and grouping criteria, etc. GENMOTIF is also parameter-friendly: it has only two intuitive parameters which, if set within reasonable bounds, do not substantially affect its performance. We demonstrate the value of our approach in a number of synthetic and real-world settings, considering traffic volume measurements, accelerometer signals, and telephone call records.
  @cite_26: Given the pervasiveness of time series data in all human endeavors, and the ubiquity of clustering as a data mining application, it is somewhat surprising that the problem of time series clustering from a single stream remains largely unsolved. Most work on time series clustering considers the clustering of individual time series, e.g., gene expression profiles, individual heartbeats or individual gait cycles. The few attempts at clustering time series streams have been shown to be objectively incorrect in some cases, and in other cases shown to work only on the most contrived datasets by carefully adjusting a large set of parameters. In this work, we make two fundamental contributions. First, we show that the problem definition for time series clustering from streams currently used is inherently flawed, and a new definition is necessary. Second, we show that the Minimum Description Length (MDL) framework offers an efficient, effective and essentially parameter-free method for time series clustering. We show that our method produces objectively correct results on a wide variety of datasets from medicine, zoology and industrial process analyses.
  @cite_6: In time series mining, one of the interesting tasks that attract many researchers is time series clustering which is classified into two main categories. Whole time series clustering considers how to cluster multiple time series, and the other one is Subsequence Time Series (STS) clustering, a clustering of subparts or subsequences within a single time series. Deplorably, STS clustering is not preferable even though it had widely been used as a subroutine in various mining tasks, e.g., rule discovery, anomaly detection, or classification, due to the recent finding a decade ago that STS clustering problem can produce meaningless results. There have been numerous attempts to resolve this problem but seemed to be unsuccessful. Until the two most recent attempts, they seem to accomplish in producing meaningful results; however, their approaches do need some predefined constraint values, such as the width of the subsequences that are in fact quite subjective and sensitive. Thus, we propose a novel parameter-free clustering technique to eliminate this problem by utilizing a motif discovery algorithm and some statistical principles to properly determine these parameters. Our experimental results from well-known datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in selecting the proper subsequence width, and in turn leading to meaningful and highly accurate results.
summary: Other algorithms have been proposed for the task of time series subsequence clustering @cite_6 @cite_26 . Though this task and the one of finding motifs with support have common aspects, they are conceptually different. Time series subsequence clustering aims at obtaining a good and compact representation of the whole time series while, as shown in @cite_26 , ignoring some data. However, motif discovery aims at finding characteristic patterns (with support) that do not necessarily need to reliably and compactly represent the full time series. In fact, the segments used to derive the motifs can actually represent a tiny part of the time series (i.e., @math , as mentioned in the main text).