Asymptotic Dynamic Time Warping calculation with utilizing value repetition

Abstract

Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is a popular method for measuring the similarity of time series. It is widely used in various domains. A major drawback of DTW is that it has a high computational complexity. To address this problem, pruning techniques to calculate the exact DTW distance, as well as DTW approximation methods, have become important approaches. In this paper, we introduce Blocked Dynamic Time Warping (BDTW), a new similarity measure which works on run-length encoded time series representation. BDTW utilizes any repetitive values (zero and nonzero) in time series to reduce DTW computation time. BDTW closely approximates DTW distance, and it is significantly faster than traditional DTW for time series with high levels of value repetition. Moreover, BDTW can be combined with time series representation methods which provide constant segments, to serve as a close approximation method even for the time series without value repetition. Constrained BDTW, BDTW upper bound and BDTW lower bound are discussed as variations of BDTW. BDTW upper bound and BDTW lower bound are presented as a new DTW upper bound and lower bound which can be efficiently applied on time series with high levels of value repetition for pruning unhopeful alignments and matches in the exact DTW calculation. We show the effectiveness of BDTW and its variations on different applications using the following datasets: Almanac of Minutely Power, Refit Smart Homes, as well as the 85 datasets from the University of California, Riverside time series classification archive (UCR archive).