Unimodal Segmentation of Sequences

Abstract

We study the problem of segmenting a sequence into k pieces so that the resulting segmentation satisfies monotonicity or unimodality constraints. Unimodal functions can be used to model phenomena in which a measured variable first increases to a certain level and then decreases. We combine a well-known unimodal regression algorithm with a simple dynamic-programming approach to obtain an optimal quadratic-time algorithm for the problem of unimodal k-segmentation. In addition, we describe a more efficient greedy-merging heuristic that is experimentally shown to give solutions very close to the optimal. As a concrete application of our algorithms, we describe two methods for testing if a sequence behaves unimodally or not. Our experimental evaluation shows that our algorithms and the proposed unimodality tests give very intuitive results.