An Adaptive Density-Based Time Series Clustering Algorithm: A Case Study on Rainfall Patterns

Current time series clustering algorithms fail to effectively mine clustering distribution characteristics of time series data without sufficient prior knowledge. Furthermore, these algorithms fail to simultaneously consider the spatial attributes, non-spatial time series attribute values, and non-spatial time series attribute trends. This paper proposes an adaptive density-based time series clustering (DTSC) algorithm that simultaneously considers the three above-mentioned attributes to relieve these limitations. In this algorithm, the Delaunay triangulation is first utilized in combination with particle swarm optimization (PSO) to adaptively obtain objects with similar spatial attributes. An improved density-based clustering strategy is then adopted to detect clusters with similar non-spatial time series attribute values and time series attribute trends. The effectiveness and efficiency of the DTSC algorithm are validated by experiments on simulated datasets and real applications. The results indicate that the proposed DTSC algorithm effectively detects time series clusters with arbitrary shapes and similar attributes and densities while considering noises.