Understanding and distinguishing temporal patterns in time series data is essential for scientific discovery and decision-making. For example, in biomedical research, uncovering meaningful patterns in physiological signals can improve diagnosis, risk assessment, and patient outcomes. However, existing methods for time series pattern discovery face major challenges, including high computational complexity, limited interpretability, and difficulty in capturing meaningful temporal structures. To address these gaps, we introduce a novel learning framework that jointly trains two Transformer models using complementary time series representations: shapelet-based representations to capture localized temporal structures and traditional feature engineering to encode statistical properties. The learned shapelets serve as interpretable signatures that differentiate time series across classification labels. Additionally, we develop a visual analytics system -- SigTIme -- with coordinated views to facilitate exploration of time series signatures from multiple perspectives, aiding in useful insights generation. We quantitatively evaluate our learning framework on eight publicly available datasets and one proprietary clinical dataset. Additionally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our system through two usage scenarios along with the domain experts: one involving public ECG data and the other focused on preterm labor analysis.

Explaining time series classification models is crucial, particularly in high-stakes applications such as healthcare and finance, where transparency and trust play a critical role. Although numerous time series classification methods have identified key subsequences, known as shapelets, as core features for achieving state-of-the-art performance and validating their pivotal role in classification outcomes, existing post-hoc time series explanation (PHTSE) methods primarily focus on timestep-level feature attribution. These explanation methods overlook the fundamental prior that classification outcomes are predominantly driven by key shapelets. To bridge this gap, we present ShapeX, an innovative framework that segments time series into meaningful shapelet-driven segments and employs Shapley values to assess their saliency. At the core of ShapeX lies the Shapelet Describe-and-Detect (SDD) framework, which effectively learns a diverse set of shapelets essential for classification. We further demonstrate that ShapeX produces explanations which reveal causal relationships instead of just correlations, owing to the atomicity properties of shapelets. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that ShapeX outperforms existing methods in identifying the most relevant subsequences, enhancing both the precision and causal fidelity of time series explanations.

Deep clustering uncovers hidden patterns and groups in complex time series data, yet its opaque decision-making limits use in safety-critical settings. This survey offers a structured overview of explainable deep clustering for time series, collecting current methods and their real-world applications. We thoroughly discuss and compare peer-reviewed and preprint papers through application domains across healthcare, finance, IoT, and climate science. Our analysis reveals that most work relies on autoencoder and attention architectures, with limited support for streaming, irregularly sampled, or privacy-preserved series, and interpretability is still primarily treated as an add-on. To push the field forward, we outline six research opportunities: (1) combining complex networks with built-in interpretability; (2) setting up clear, faithfulness-focused evaluation metrics for unsupervised explanations; (3) building explainers that adapt to live data streams; (4) crafting explanations tailored to specific domains; (5) adding human-in-the-loop methods that refine clusters and explanations together; and (6) improving our understanding of how time series clustering models work internally. By making interpretability a primary design goal rather than an afterthought, we propose the groundwork for the next generation of trustworthy deep clustering time series analytics.

Many real-world multivariate time series are collected from a network of physical objects embedded with software, electronics, and sensors. The quasi-periodic signals generated by these objects often follow a similar repetitive and periodic pattern, but have variations in the period, and come in different lengths caused by timing (synchronization) errors. Given a multitude of such quasi-periodic time series, can we build machine learning models to identify those time series that behave differently from the majority of the observations? In addition, can the models help human experts to understand how the decision was made? We propose a sequence to Gaussian Mixture Model (seq2GMM) framework. The overarching goal of this framework is to identify unusual and interesting time series within a network time series database. We further develop a surrogate-based optimization algorithm that can efficiently train the seq2GMM model. Seq2GMM exhibits strong empirical performance on a plurality of public benchmark datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art anomaly detection techniques by a significant margin. We also theoretically analyze the convergence property of the proposed training algorithm and provide numerical results to substantiate our theoretical claims.

Early detection of patient deterioration is crucial for reducing mortality rates. Heart rate data has shown promise in assessing patient health, and wearable devices offer a cost-effective solution for real-time monitoring. However, extracting meaningful insights from diverse heart rate data and handling missing values in wearable device data remain key challenges. To address these challenges, we propose TARL, an innovative approach that models the structural relationships of representative subsequences, known as shapelets, in heart rate time series. TARL creates a shapelet-transition knowledge graph to model shapelet dynamics in heart rate time series, indicating illness progression and potential future changes. We further introduce a transition-aware knowledge embedding to reinforce relationships among shapelets and quantify the impact of missing values, enabling the formulation of comprehensive heart rate representations. These representations capture explanatory structures and predict future heart rate trends, aiding early illness detection. We collaborate with physicians and nurses to gather ICU patient heart rate data from wearables and diagnostic metrics assessing illness severity for evaluating deterioration. Experiments on real-world ICU data demonstrate that TARL achieves both high reliability and early detection. A case study further showcases TARL's explainable detection process, highlighting its potential as an AI-driven tool to assist clinicians in recognizing early signs of patient deterioration.

Shapelets are discriminative subsequences (or shapes) with high interpretability in time series classification. Due to the time-intensive nature of shapelet discovery, existing shapelet-based methods mainly focus on selecting discriminative shapes while discarding others to achieve candidate subsequence sparsification. However, this approach may exclude beneficial shapes and overlook the varying contributions of shapelets to classification performance. To this end, we propose a Soft sparse Shapes (SoftShape) model for efficient time series classification. Our approach mainly introduces soft shape sparsification and soft shape learning blocks. The former transforms shapes into soft representations based on classification contribution scores, merging lower-scored ones into a single shape to retain and differentiate all subsequence information. The latter facilitates intra- and inter-shape temporal pattern learning, improving model efficiency by using sparsified soft shapes as inputs. Specifically, we employ a learnable router to activate a subset of class-specific expert networks for intra-shape pattern learning. Meanwhile, a shared expert network learns inter-shape patterns by converting sparsified shapes into sequences. Extensive experiments show that SoftShape outperforms state-of-the-art methods and produces interpretable results.

Patient-ventilator asynchrony (PVA) is a common and critical issue during mechanical ventilation, affecting up to 85% of patients. PVA can result in clinical complications such as discomfort, sleep disruption, and potentially more severe conditions like ventilator-induced lung injury and diaphragm dysfunction. Traditional PVA management, which relies on manual adjustments by healthcare providers, is often inadequate due to delays and errors. While various computational methods, including rule-based, statistical, and deep learning approaches, have been developed to detect PVA events, they face challenges related to dataset imbalances and lack of interpretability. In this work, we propose a shapelet-based approach SHIP for PVA detection, utilizing shapelets -- discriminative subsequences in time-series data -- to enhance detection accuracy and interpretability. Our method addresses dataset imbalances through shapelet-based data augmentation and constructs a shapelet pool to transform the dataset for more effective classification. The combined shapelet and statistical features are then used in a classifier to identify PVA events. Experimental results on medical datasets show that SHIP significantly improves PVA detection while providing interpretable insights into model decisions.

This paper introduces NN-STNE, a neural network using t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) as a hidden layer to reduce input dimensions by mapping long time-series data into shapelet membership probabilities. A Gaussian kernel-based mean square error preserves local data structure, while K-means initializes shapelet candidates due to the non-convex optimization challenge. Unlike existing methods, our approach uses t-SNE to address crowding in low-dimensional space and applies L1-norm regularization to optimize shapelet length. Evaluations on the UCR dataset and an electrical component manipulation task, like switching on, demonstrate improved clustering accuracy over state-of-the-art feature-learning methods in robotics.

Early detection of patient deterioration is essential for timely treatment, with vital signs like heart rates being key health indicators. Existing methods tend to solely analyze vital sign waveforms, ignoring transition relationships of waveforms within each vital sign and the correlation strengths among various vital signs. Such studies often overlook nuanced illness deterioration, which is the early sign of worsening health but is difficult to detect. In this paper, we introduce CAND, a novel method that organizes the transition relationships and the correlations within and among vital signs as domain-specific and cross-domain knowledge. CAND jointly models these knowledge in a unified representation space, considerably enhancing the early detection of nuanced illness deterioration. In addition, CAND integrates a Bayesian inference method that utilizes augmented knowledge from domain-specific and cross-domain knowledge to address the ambiguities in correlation strengths. With this architecture, the correlation strengths can be effectively inferred to guide joint modeling and enhance representations of vital signs. This allows a more holistic and accurate interpretation of patient health. Our experiments on a real-world ICU dataset demonstrate that CAND significantly outperforms existing methods in both effectiveness and earliness in detecting nuanced illness deterioration. Moreover, we conduct a case study for the interpretable detection process to showcase the practicality of CAND.

Multivariate time series (MTS) classification is widely applied in fields such as industry, healthcare, and finance, aiming to extract key features from complex time series data for accurate decision-making and prediction. However, existing methods for MTS often struggle due to the challenges of effectively modeling high-dimensional data and the lack of labeled data, resulting in poor classification performance. To address this issue, we propose a heterogeneous relationships of subjects and shapelets method for semi-supervised MTS classification. This method offers a novel perspective by integrating various types of additional information while capturing the relationships between them. Specifically, we first utilize a contrast temporal self-attention module to obtain sparse MTS representations, and then model the similarities between these representations using soft dynamic time warping to construct a similarity graph. Secondly, we learn the shapelets for different subject types, incorporating both the subject features and their shapelets as additional information to further refine the similarity graph, ultimately generating a heterogeneous graph. Finally, we use a dual level graph attention network to get prediction. Through this method, we successfully transform dataset into a heterogeneous graph, integrating multiple additional information and achieving precise semi-supervised node classification. Experiments on the Human Activity Recognition, sleep stage classification and University of East Anglia datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in MTS classification tasks, validating its superiority.