No Arabic abstract
Markov models are often used to capture the temporal patterns of sequential data for statistical learning applications. While the Hidden Markov modeling-based learning mechanisms are well studied in literature, we analyze a symbolic-dynamics inspired approach. Under this umbrella, Markov modeling of time-series data consists of two major steps -- discretization of continuous attributes followed by estimating the size of temporal memory of the discretized sequence. These two steps are critical for the accurate and concise representation of time-series data in the discrete space. Discretization governs the information content of the resultant discretized sequence. On the other hand, memory estimation of the symbolic sequence helps to extract the predictive patterns in the discretized data. Clearly, the effectiveness of signal representation as a discrete Markov process depends on both these steps. In this paper, we will review the different techniques for discretization and memory estimation for discrete stochastic processes. In particular, we will focus on the individual problems of discretization and order estimation for discrete stochastic process. We will present some results from literature on partitioning from dynamical systems theory and order estimation using concepts of information theory and statistical learning. The paper also presents some related problem formulations which will be useful for machine learning and statistical learning application using the symbolic framework of data analysis. We present some results of statistical analysis of a complex thermoacoustic instability phenomenon during lean-premixed combustion in jet-turbine engines using the proposed Markov modeling method.
This paper presents a technique for reduced-order Markov modeling for compact representation of time-series data. In this work, symbolic dynamics-based tools have been used to infer an approximate generative Markov model. The time-series data are first symbolized by partitioning the continuous measurement space of the signal and then, the discrete sequential data are modeled using symbolic dynamics. In the proposed approach, the size of temporal memory of the symbol sequence is estimated from spectral properties of the resulting stochastic matrix corresponding to a first-order Markov model of the symbol sequence. Then, hierarchical clustering is used to represent the states of the corresponding full-state Markov model to construct a reduced-order or size Markov model with a non-deterministic algebraic structure. Subsequently, the parameters of the reduced-order Markov model are identified from the original model by making use of a Bayesian inference rule. The final model is selected using information-theoretic criteria. The proposed concept is elucidated and validated on two different data sets as examples. The first example analyzes a set of pressure data from a swirl-stabilized combustor, where controlled protocols are used to induce flame instabilities. Variations in the complexity of the derived Markov model represent how the system operating condition changes from a stable to an unstable combustion regime. In the second example, the data set is taken from NASAs data repository for prognostics of bearings on rotating shafts. We show that, even with a very small state-space, the reduced-order models are able to achieve comparable performance and that the proposed approach provides flexibility in the selection of a final model for representation and learning.
We introduce a novel geometry-oriented methodology, based on the emerging tools of topological data analysis, into the change point detection framework. The key rationale is that change points are likely to be associated with changes in geometry behind the data generating process. While the applications of topological data analysis to change point detection are potentially very broad, in this paper we primarily focus on integrating topological concepts with the existing nonparametric methods for change point detection. In particular, the proposed new geometry-oriented approach aims to enhance detection accuracy of distributional regime shift locations. Our simulation studies suggest that integration of topological data analysis with some existing algorithms for change point detection leads to consistently more accurate detection results. We illustrate our new methodology in application to the two closely related environmental time series datasets -ice phenology of the Lake Baikal and the North Atlantic Oscillation indices, in a research query for a possible association between their estimated regime shift locations.
Existing methods for structure discovery in time series data construct interpretable, compositional kernels for Gaussian process regression models. While the learned Gaussian process model provides posterior mean and variance estimates, typically the structure is learned via a greedy optimization procedure. This restricts the space of possible solutions and leads to over-confident uncertainty estimates. We introduce a fully Bayesian approach, inferring a full posterior over structures, which more reliably captures the uncertainty of the model.
Going beyond correlations, the understanding and identification of causal relationships in observational time series, an important subfield of Causal Discovery, poses a major challenge. The lack of access to a well-defined ground truth for real-world data creates the need to rely on synthetic data for the evaluation of these methods. Existing benchmarks are limited in their scope, as they either are restricted to a static selection of data sets, or do not allow for a granular assessment of the methods performance when commonly made assumptions are violated. We propose a flexible and simple to use framework for generating time series data, which is aimed at developing, evaluating, and benchmarking time series causal discovery methods. In particular, the framework can be used to fine tune novel methods on vast amounts of data, without overfitting them to a benchmark, but rather so they perform well in real-world use cases. Using our framework, we evaluate prominent time series causal discovery methods and demonstrate a notable degradation in performance when their assumptions are invalidated and their sensitivity to choice of hyperparameters. Finally, we propose future research directions and how our framework can support both researchers and practitioners.
We study anomaly detection and introduce an algorithm that processes variable length, irregularly sampled sequences or sequences with missing values. Our algorithm is fully unsupervised, however, can be readily extended to supervised or semisupervised cases when the anomaly labels are present as remarked throughout the paper. Our approach uses the Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks in order to extract temporal features and find the most relevant feature vectors for anomaly detection. We incorporate the sampling time information to our model by modulating the standard LSTM model with time modulation gates. After obtaining the most relevant features from the LSTM, we label the sequences using a Support Vector Data Descriptor (SVDD) model. We introduce a loss function and then jointly optimize the feature extraction and sequence processing mechanisms in an end-to-end manner. Through this joint optimization, the LSTM extracts the most relevant features for anomaly detection later to be used in the SVDD, hence completely removes the need for feature selection by expert knowledge. Furthermore, we provide a training algorithm for the online setup, where we optimize our model parameters with individual sequences as the new data arrives. Finally, on real-life datasets, we show that our model significantly outperforms the standard approaches thanks to its combination of LSTM with SVDD and joint optimization.