Time Series Overlapping Clustering Based on Link Community Detection

Abstract

Given the nature of time series and their vast applications, it is essential to find clustering algorithms that depict their real-life properties. Among the features that can hugely effect the options available for time series are overlapping and hierarchical properties. In this paper a novel approach to analyze time series with such features is introduced. Using the two concepts of network construction and link community detection, we have attempted to analyze and identify the mentioned properties of time series using data that is often gathered first hand. The proposed algorithm has been applied using both recent and common similarity measures on ten synthetic time series with hierarchal and overlapping features, alongside various distance measures. When testing the proposed approach, the element-centric measure of similarity indicated a clear increased accuracy for this algorithm, showing the highest accuracy when used alongside the Dynamic Time Warping distance measure. Moreover, the proposed algorithm has been very successful in identifying and forming communities for both large and small time series, thus solving another one of the main issues previous algorithms tended to have.