A variable-length motifs discovery method in time series using hybrid approach

Discovery of repeated patterns, known as motifs, from long time series is essential for providing hidden knowledge to real-world applications like medical, financial and weather analysis. Motifs can be discovered on raw time series directly or on their transformed abstract representation alternatively. Most of time series motif discovery methods require predefined motif length, which results in long execution time because we have to vary the length to discover motifs with different lengths. To solve the problem, we propose an efficient method for discovering variable length motifs in combination of approximate method with exact verification. First, symbolic representation is adopted to discover motifs roughly followed by exact examination of the found motifs with original real-valued data to achieve fast and exact discovery. The experiments show that our proposed method successfully discovered significant motifs efficiently in comparison with state-of-the-art methods: MK and SBF.