No Arabic abstract
In many scenarios, humans prefer a text-based representation of quantitative data over numerical, tabular, or graphical representations. The attractiveness of textual summaries for complex data has inspired research on data-to-text systems. While there are several data-to-text tools for time series, few of them try to mimic how humans summarize for time series. In this paper, we propose a model to create human-like text descriptions for time series. Our system finds patterns in time series data and ranks these patterns based on empirical observations of human behavior using utility estimation. Our proposed utility estimation model is a Bayesian network capturing interdependencies between different patterns. We describe the learning steps for this network and introduce baselines along with their performance for each step. The output of our system is a natural language description of time series that attempts to match a humans summary of the same data.
We propose an algorithm to impute and forecast a time series by transforming the observed time series into a matrix, utilizing matrix estimation to recover missing values and de-noise observed entries, and performing linear regression to make predictions. At the core of our analysis is a representation result, which states that for a large model class, the transformed time series matrix is (approximately) low-rank. In effect, this generalizes the widely used Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA) in time series literature, and allows us to establish a rigorous link between time series analysis and matrix estimation. The key to establishing this link is constructing a Page matrix with non-overlapping entries rather than a Hankel matrix as is commonly done in the literature (e.g., SSA). This particular matrix structure allows us to provide finite sample analysis for imputation and prediction, and prove the asymptotic consistency of our method. Another salient feature of our algorithm is that it is model agnostic with respect to both the underlying time dynamics and the noise distribution in the observations. The noise agnostic property of our approach allows us to recover the latent states when only given access to noisy and partial observations a la a Hidden Markov Model; e.g., recovering the time-varying parameter of a Poisson process without knowing that the underlying process is Poisson. Furthermore, since our forecasting algorithm requires regression with noisy features, our approach suggests a matrix estimation based method - coupled with a novel, non-standard matrix estimation error metric - to solve the error-in-variable regression problem, which could be of interest in its own right. Through synthetic and real-world datasets, we demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms standard software packages (including R libraries) in the presence of missing data as well as high levels of noise.
Anomaly detection on multivariate time-series is of great importance in both data mining research and industrial applications. Recent approaches have achieved significant progress in this topic, but there is remaining limitations. One major limitation is that they do not capture the relationships between different time-series explicitly, resulting in inevitable false alarms. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised framework for multivariate time-series anomaly detection to address this issue. Our framework considers each univariate time-series as an individual feature and includes two graph attention layers in parallel to learn the complex dependencies of multivariate time-series in both temporal and feature dimensions. In addition, our approach jointly optimizes a forecasting-based model and are construction-based model, obtaining better time-series representations through a combination of single-timestamp prediction and reconstruction of the entire time-series. We demonstrate the efficacy of our model through extensive experiments. The proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art models on three real-world datasets. Further analysis shows that our method has good interpretability and is useful for anomaly diagnosis.
Decomposing complex time series into trend, seasonality, and remainder components is an important task to facilitate time series anomaly detection and forecasting. Although numerous methods have been proposed, there are still many time series characteristics exhibiting in real-world data which are not addressed properly, including 1) ability to handle seasonality fluctuation and shift, and abrupt change in trend and reminder; 2) robustness on data with anomalies; 3) applicability on time series with long seasonality period. In the paper, we propose a novel and generic time series decomposition algorithm to address these challenges. Specifically, we extract the trend component robustly by solving a regression problem using the least absolute deviations loss with sparse regularization. Based on the extracted trend, we apply the the non-local seasonal filtering to extract the seasonality component. This process is repeated until accurate decomposition is obtained. Experiments on different synthetic and real-world time series datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing solutions.
Over the past years, the industrial sector has seen many innovations brought about by automation. Inherent in this automation is the installation of sensor networks for status monitoring and data collection. One of the major challenges in these data-rich environments is how to extract and exploit information from these large volume of data to detect anomalies, discover patterns to reduce downtimes and manufacturing errors, reduce energy usage, predict faults/failures, effective maintenance schedules, etc. To address these issues, we developed TSML. Its technology is based on using the pipeline of lightweight filters as building blocks to process huge amount of industrial time series data in parallel.
Time series data analytics has been a problem of substantial interests for decades, and Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) has been the most widely adopted technique to measure dissimilarity between time series. A number of global-alignment kernels have since been proposed in the spirit of DTW to extend its use to kernel-based estimation method such as support vector machine. However, those kernels suffer from diagonal dominance of the Gram matrix and a quadratic complexity w.r.t. the sample size. In this work, we study a family of alignment-aware positive definite (p.d.) kernels, with its feature embedding given by a distribution of emph{Random Warping Series (RWS)}. The proposed kernel does not suffer from the issue of diagonal dominance while naturally enjoys a emph{Random Features} (RF) approximation, which reduces the computational complexity of existing DTW-based techniques from quadratic to linear in terms of both the number and the length of time-series. We also study the convergence of the RF approximation for the domain of time series of unbounded length. Our extensive experiments on 16 benchmark datasets demonstrate that RWS outperforms or matches state-of-the-art classification and clustering methods in both accuracy and computational time. Our code and data is available at { url{https://github.com/IBM/RandomWarpingSeries}}.