Time Series Knowledge Mining
Fabian Mörchen · 2006
An important goal of knowledge discovery is the search for patterns in data that can help explain the underlying process that generated the data. The patterns are required to be new, useful, and understandable to humans. In this work we present a new method for the understandable description of local temporal relationships in multivariate data, called Time Series Knowledge Mining (TSKM). We define the Time Series Knowledge Representation (TSKR) as a new language for expressing temporal knowledge. The patterns have a hierarchical structure, each level corresponds to a single temporal concept. On the lowest level, intervals are used to represent duration. Overlapping parts of intervals represent coincidence on the next level. Several such blocks of intervals are connected with a partial order relation on the highest level. Each pattern element consists of a semiotic triple to connect syntactic and semantic information with pragmatics. The patterns are very compact, but offer details for each element on demand. In comparison with related approaches, the TSKR is shown to have advantages in robustness, expressivity, and comprehensibility. Efficient algorithms for the discovery of the patterns are proposed. The search for coincidence as well as partial order can be formulated as variants of the well known frequent itemset problem. One of the best known algorithms for this problem is therefore adapted for our purposes. Human interaction is used during the mining to analyze and validate partial results as early as possible and guide further processing steps. The efficacy of the methods is demonstrated using several data sets. In an application to sports medicine the results were recognized as valid and useful by an expert of the field.