Transitional SAX Representation for Knowledge Discovery for Time Series

Numerous dimensionality-reducing representations of time series have been proposed in data mining and have proved to be useful, especially in handling a high volume of time series data. Among them, widely used symbolic representations such as symbolic aggregate approximation and piecewise aggregate approximation focus on information of local averages of time series. To compensate for such methods, several attempts were made to include trend information. However, the included trend information is quite simple, leading to great information loss. Such information is hardly extendable, so adjusting the level of simplicity to a higher complexity is difficult. In this paper, we propose a new symbolic representation method called transitional symbolic aggregate approximation that incorporates transitional information into symbolic aggregate approximations. We show that the proposed method, satisfying a lower bound of the Euclidean distance, is able to preserve meaningful information, including dynamic trend transitions in segmented time series, while still reducing dimensionality. We also show that this method is advantageous from theoretical aspects of interpretability, and practical and superior in terms of time-series classification tasks when compared with existing symbolic representation methods.