Multivariate Time Series Classification with WEASEL+MUSE

TL;DR

WEASEL+MUSE is a novel multivariate time series classifier that effectively captures feature interactions and filters noise, achieving high accuracy and robustness across diverse datasets.

Contribution

It introduces a new multivariate feature extraction and filtering method that encodes context, improving classification accuracy and robustness for MTS data.

Findings

Achieves top accuracy on 20 benchmark datasets

Outperforms domain-specific methods in motion gesture recognition

Produces a small, highly discriminative feature set

Abstract

Multivariate time series (MTS) arise when multiple interconnected sensors record data over time. Dealing with this high-dimensional data is challenging for every classifier for at least two aspects: First, an MTS is not only characterized by individual feature values, but also by the interplay of features in different dimensions. Second, this typically adds large amounts of irrelevant data and noise. We present our novel MTS classifier WEASEL+MUSE which addresses both challenges. WEASEL+MUSE builds a multivariate feature vector, first using a sliding-window approach applied to each dimension of the MTS, then extracts discrete features per window and dimension. The feature vector is subsequently fed through feature selection, removing non-discriminative features, and analysed by a machine learning classifier. The novelty of WEASEL+MUSE lies in its specific way of extracting and filtering multivariate features from MTS by encoding context information into each feature. Still the resulting feature set is small, yet very discriminative and useful for MTS classification. Based on a popular benchmark of 20 MTS datasets, we found that WEASEL+MUSE is among the most accurate classifiers, when compared to the state of the art. The outstanding robustness of WEASEL+MUSE is further confirmed based on motion gesture recognition data, where it out-of-the-box achieved similar accuracies as domain-specific methods.