Multivariate Time Series Classification with WEASEL+MUSE

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, a MTS is not only characterized by individual feature values, but also by the co-occurrence of features in different dimensions. Second, this typically adds large amounts of irrelevant data and noise. We present our novel MTS classifier WEASEL+MUSE (Word ExtrAction for time SEries cLassification + MUltivariate Symbols and dErivatives) 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, resulting in a small, yet very discriminative feature set useful for MTS classification. Based on a popular benchmark of 20 MTS datasets, we found that WEASEL+MUSE is the most accurate domain agnostic classifier, 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.