Capturing Temporal Components for Time Series Classification
This work addresses the challenge of generalizing time series classification to longer sequences, which is incremental in improving representation learning for domains like IoT data analysis.
The paper tackles the problem of time series classification by introducing a compositional representation learning approach that segments sequential data into statistically coherent components, achieving competitive performance on public benchmarks.
Analyzing sequential data is crucial in many domains, particularly due to the abundance of data collected from the Internet of Things paradigm. Time series classification, the task of categorizing sequential data, has gained prominence, with machine learning approaches demonstrating remarkable performance on public benchmark datasets. However, progress has primarily been in designing architectures for learning representations from raw data at fixed (or ideal) time scales, which can fail to generalize to longer sequences. This work introduces a \textit{compositional representation learning} approach trained on statistically coherent components extracted from sequential data. Based on a multi-scale change space, an unsupervised approach is proposed to segment the sequential data into chunks with similar statistical properties. A sequence-based encoder model is trained in a multi-task setting to learn compositional representations from these temporal components for time series classification. We demonstrate its effectiveness through extensive experiments on publicly available time series classification benchmarks. Evaluating the coherence of segmented components shows its competitive performance on the unsupervised segmentation task.