Shapelets¶

Shapelets are defined in [1] as “subsequences that are in some sense maximally representative of a class”. Informally, if we assume a binary classification setting, a shapelet is discriminant if it is present in most series of one class and absent from series of the other class. To assess the level of presence, one uses shapelet matches:

$d(\mathbf{x}, \mathbf{s}) = \min_t \| \mathbf{x}_{t\rightarrow t+L} - \mathbf{s} \|_2$

where $$L$$ is the length (number of timestamps) of shapelet $$\mathbf{s}$$ and $$\mathbf{x}_{t\rightarrow t+L}$$ is the subsequence extracted from time series $$\mathbf{x}$$ that starts at time index $$t$$ and stops at $$t+L$$. If the above-defined distance is small enough, then shapelet $$\textbf{s}$$ is supposed to be present in time series $$\mathbf{x}$$.

The distance from a time series to a shapelet is done by sliding the shorter shapelet over the longer time series and calculating the point-wise distances. The minimal distance found is returned.

In a classification setting, the goal is then to find the most discriminant shapelets given some labeled time series data. Shapelets can be mined from the training set [1] or learned using gradient-descent.

Learning Time-series Shapelets¶

tslearn provides an implementation of “Learning Time-series Shapelets”, introduced in [2], that is an instance of the latter category. In Learning Shapelets, shapelets are learned such that time series represented in their shapelet-transform space (i.e. their distances to each of the shapelets) are linearly separable. A shapelet-transform representation of a time series $$\mathbf{x}$$ given a set of shapelets $$\{\mathbf{s}_i\}_{i \leq k}$$ is the feature vector: $$[d(\mathbf{x}, \mathbf{s}_1), \cdots, d(\mathbf{x}, \mathbf{s}_k)]$$. This is illustrated below with a two-dimensional example.

An example of how time series are transformed into linearly separable distances.

In tslearn, in order to learn shapelets and transform timeseries to their corresponding shapelet-transform space, the following code can be used:

from tslearn.shapelets import LearningShapelets

model = LearningShapelets(n_shapelets_per_size={3: 2})
model.fit(X_train, y_train)
train_distances = model.transform(X_train)
test_distances = model.transform(X_test)
shapelets = model.shapelets_as_time_series_


A tslearn.shapelets.LearningShapelets model has several hyper-parameters, such as the maximum number of iterations and the batch size. One important hyper-parameters is the n_shapelets_per_size which is a dictionary where the keys correspond to the desired lengths of the shapelets and the values to the desired number of shapelets per length. When set to None, this dictionary will be determined by a heuristic. After creating the model, we can fit the optimal shapelets using our training data. After a fitting phase, the distances can be calculated using the transform function. Moreover, you can easily access the learned shapelets by using the shapelets_as_time_series_ attribute.

It is important to note that due to the fact that a technique based on gradient-descent is used to learn the shapelets, our model can be prone to numerical issues (e.g. exploding and vanishing gradients). For that reason, it is important to normalize your data. This can be done before passing the data to the fit and transform methods, by using our tslearn.preprocessing module but this can be done internally by the algorithm itself by setting the scale parameter.

References¶

 [1] (1, 2) L. Ye & E. Keogh. Time series shapelets: a new primitive for data mining. SIGKDD 2009.
 [2] Grabocka et al. Learning Time-Series Shapelets. SIGKDD 2014.