# Time series cluster kernels to exploit informative missingness and incomplete label information

## TL;DR

This paper introduces advanced kernel methods for time series clustering that leverage informative missing data and incomplete labels, improving accuracy in real-world, healthcare-related applications.

## Contribution

It develops a novel kernel that exploits missing data patterns and incomplete labels, extending the TCK framework for more informative unsupervised learning.

## Key findings

- Effective in benchmark datasets
- Improves clustering accuracy with missing data
- Demonstrated on healthcare electronic health records

## Abstract

The time series cluster kernel (TCK) provides a powerful tool for analysing multivariate time series subject to missing data. TCK is designed using an ensemble learning approach in which Bayesian mixture models form the base models. Because of the Bayesian approach, TCK can naturally deal with missing values without resorting to imputation and the ensemble strategy ensures robustness to hyperparameters, making it particularly well suited for unsupervised learning. However, TCK assumes missing at random and that the underlying missingness mechanism is ignorable, i.e. uninformative, an assumption that does not hold in many real-world applications, such as e.g. medicine. To overcome this limitation, we present a kernel capable of exploiting the potentially rich information in the missing values and patterns, as well as the information from the observed data. In our approach, we create a representation of the missing pattern, which is incorporated into mixed mode mixture models in such a way that the information provided by the missing patterns is effectively exploited. Moreover, we also propose a semi-supervised kernel, capable of taking advantage of incomplete label information to learn more accurate similarities. Experiments on benchmark data, as well as a real-world case study of patients described by longitudinal electronic health record data who potentially suffer from hospital-acquired infections, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.