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.

Time series shapelets are discriminative subsequences that have been recently found effective for time series clustering (TSC). The shapelets are convenient for interpreting the clusters. Thus, the main challenge for TSC is to discover high-quality variable-length shapelets to discriminate different clusters. In this paper, we propose a novel autoencoder-shapelet approach (AUTOSHAPE), which is the first study to take the advantage of both autoencoder and shapelet for determining shapelets in an unsupervised manner. An autoencoder is specially designed to learn high-quality shapelets. More specifically, for guiding the latent representation learning, we employ the latest self-supervised loss to learn the unified embeddings for variable-length shapelet candidates (time series subsequences) of different variables, and propose the diversity loss to select the discriminating embeddings in the unified space. We introduce the reconstruction loss to recover shapelets in the original time series space for clustering. Finally, we adopt Davies Bouldin index (DBI) to inform AUTOSHAPE of the clustering performance during learning. We present extensive experiments on AUTOSHAPE. To evaluate the clustering performance on univariate time series (UTS), we compare AUTOSHAPE with 15 representative methods using UCR archive datasets. To study the performance of multivariate time series (MTS), we evaluate AUTOSHAPE on 30 UEA archive datasets with 5 competitive methods. The results validate that AUTOSHAPE is the best among all the methods compared. We interpret clusters with shapelets, and can obtain interesting intuitions about clusters in two UTS case studies and one MTS case study, respectively.

In the research area of time series classification (TSC), ensemble shapelet transform (ST) algorithm is one of state-of-the-art algorithms for classification. However, the time complexity of it is often higher than other algorithms. Hence, two strategies of reducing the high time complexity are proposed in this paper. The first one is to only exploit shapelet candidates whose length is a given small value, whereas the ensemble ST uses shapelet candidates of all the feasible lengths. The second one is to train a single linear classifier in the feature space, whereas the ensemble ST requires an ensemble classifier trained in the feature space. This paper focuses on the theoretical evidences and the empirical implementation of these two strategies. The theoretical part guarantees a near-lossless accuracy under some preconditions while reducing the time complexity. In the empirical part, an algorithm is proposed as a model implementation of these two strategies. The superior performance of the proposed algorithm on some experiments shows the effectiveness of these two strategies.