Dynamic time warping (DTW) is a fundamental technique in time series analysis for comparing one curve to another using a flexible time-warping function. However, it was designed to compare a single pair of curves. In many applications, such as in metabolomics and image series analysis, alignment is simultaneously needed for multiple pairs. Because the underlying warping functions are often related, independent application of DTW to each pair is a sub-optimal solution. Yet, it is largely unknown how to efficiently conduct a joint alignment with all warping functions simultaneously considered, since any given warping function is constrained by the others and dynamic programming cannot be applied.

Many (if not all) real-world applications require efficient handling of uncertainty and a compact representation of a wide variety of knowledge. Indeed, complex concepts and relationships that typically comprise expert knowledge may be difficult to express in graphical models but can be represented compactly using classical logic.

We propose several schemes for upper bounding the optimal value of the constrained most probable explanation (CMPE) problem.