PARALLEL DATA LAB 

PDL Abstract

Time Series Clustering: Complex is Simpler!

Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Machine learning, June 28 - July 2, 2011,
Bellevue, WA.

Lei Li, B. Aditya Prakash

School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/

Given a motion capture sequence, how to identify the category of the motion? Classifying human motions is a critical task in motion editing and synthesizing, for which manual labeling is clearly inefficient for large databases. Here we study the general problem of time series clustering. We propose a novel method of clustering time series that can (a) learn joint temporal dynamics in the data; (b) handle time lags; and (c) produce interpretable features. We achieve this by developing complex-valued linear dynamical systems (CLDS), which include realvalued Kalman filters as a special case; our advantage is that the transition matrix is simpler (just diagonal), and the transmission one easier to interpret. We then present Complex- Fit, a novel EM algorithm to learn the parameters for the general model and its special case for clustering. Our approach produces significant improvement in clustering quality, 1.5 to 5 times better than well-known competitors on real motion capture sequences.

FULL PAPER: pdf