Logical-shapelets: an expressive primitive for time series classification

Time series shapelets are small, local patterns in a time series that are highly predictive of a class and are thus very useful features for building classifiers and for certain visualization and summarization tasks. While shapelets were introduced only recently, they have already seen significant adoption and extension in the community. Despite their immense potential as a data mining primitive, there are two important limitations of shapelets. First, their expressiveness is limited to simple binary presence/absence questions. Second, even though shapelets are computed offline, the time taken to compute them is significant. In this work, we address the latter problem by introducing a novel algorithm that finds shapelets in less time than current methods by an order of magnitude. Our algorithm is based on intelligent caching and reuse of computations, and the admissible pruning of the search space. Because our algorithm is so fast, it creates an opportunity to consider more expressive shapelet queries. In particular, we show for the first time an augmented shapelet representation that distinguishes the data based on conjunctions or disjunctions of shapelets. We call our novel representation Logical-Shapelets. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach on the classic benchmark datasets used for these problems, and show several case studies where logical shapelets significantly outperform the original shapelet representation and other time series classification techniques. We demonstrate the utility of our ideas in domains as diverse as gesture recognition, robotics, and biometrics.