Time Series Classification (TSC) is an important and challenging task for many visual computing applications. Despite the extensive range of methods developed for TSC, relatively few utilized Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). In this paper, we propose two novel attention blocks (Global Temporal Attention and Temporal Pseudo-Gaussian augmented Self-Attention) that can enhance deep learning-based TSC approaches, even when such approaches are designed and optimized for a specific dataset or task. We validate this claim by evaluating multiple state-of-the-art deep learning-based TSC models on the University of East Anglia (UEA) benchmark, a standardized collection of 30 Multivariate Time Series Classification (MTSC) datasets. We show that adding the proposed attention blocks improves base models' average accuracy by up to 3.6%. Additionally, the proposed TPS block uses a new injection module to include the relative positional information in transformers. As a standalone unit with less computational complexity, it enables TPS to perform better than most of the state-of-the-art DNN-based TSC methods. The source codes for our experimental setups and proposed attention blocks are made publicly available.
In this paper, we introduce a new approach to address the challenge of generalization in hyperspectral anomaly detection (AD). Our method eliminates the need for adjusting parameters or retraining on new test scenes as required by most existing methods. Employing an image-level training paradigm, we achieve a general anomaly enhancement network for hyperspectral AD that only needs to be trained once. Trained on a set of anomaly-free hyperspectral images with random masks, our network can learn the spatial context characteristics between anomalies and background in an unsupervised way. Additionally, a plug-and-play model selection module is proposed to search for a spatial-spectral transform domain that is more suitable for AD task than the original data. To establish a unified benchmark to comprehensively evaluate our method and existing methods, we develop a large-scale hyperspectral AD dataset (HAD100) that includes 100 real test scenes with diverse anomaly targets. In comparison experiments, we combine our network with a parameter-free detector and achieve the optimal balance between detection accuracy and inference speed among state-of-the-art AD methods. Experimental results also show that our method still achieves competitive performance when the training and test set are captured by different sensor devices. Our code is available at //github.com/ZhaoxuLi123/AETNet.
Hierarchical classification (HC) assigns each object with multiple labels organized into a hierarchical structure. The existing deep learning based HC methods usually predict an instance starting from the root node until a leaf node is reached. However, in the real world, images interfered by noise, occlusion, blur, or low resolution may not provide sufficient information for the classification at subordinate levels. To address this issue, we propose a novel semantic guided level-category hybrid prediction network (SGLCHPN) that can jointly perform the level and category prediction in an end-to-end manner. SGLCHPN comprises two modules: a visual transformer that extracts feature vectors from the input images, and a semantic guided cross-attention module that uses categories word embeddings as queries to guide learning category-specific representations. In order to evaluate the proposed method, we construct two new datasets in which images are at a broad range of quality and thus are labeled to different levels (depths) in the hierarchy according to their individual quality. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed HC method.
Satellite-based Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images can be used as a source of remote sensed imagery regardless of cloud cover and day-night cycle. However, the speckle noise and varying image acquisition conditions pose a challenge for change detection classifiers. This paper proposes a new method of improving SAR image processing to produce higher quality difference images for the classification algorithms. The method is built on a neural network-based mapping transformation function that produces artificial SAR images from a location in the requested acquisition conditions. The inputs for the model are: previous SAR images from the location, imaging angle information from the SAR images, digital elevation model, and weather conditions. The method was tested with data from a location in North-East Finland by using Sentinel-1 SAR images from European Space Agency, weather data from Finnish Meteorological Institute, and a digital elevation model from National Land Survey of Finland. In order to verify the method, changes to the SAR images were simulated, and the performance of the proposed method was measured using experimentation where it gave substantial improvements to performance when compared to a more conventional method of creating difference images.
The variety of complex algorithmic approaches for tackling time-series classification problems has grown considerably over the past decades, including the development of sophisticated but challenging-to-interpret deep-learning-based methods. But without comparison to simpler methods it can be difficult to determine when such complexity is required to obtain strong performance on a given problem. Here we evaluate the performance of an extremely simple classification approach -- a linear classifier in the space of two simple features that ignore the sequential ordering of the data: the mean and standard deviation of time-series values. Across a large repository of 128 univariate time-series classification problems, this simple distributional moment-based approach outperformed chance on 69 problems, and reached 100% accuracy on two problems. With a neuroimaging time-series case study, we find that a simple linear model based on the mean and standard deviation performs better at classifying individuals with schizophrenia than a model that additionally includes features of the time-series dynamics. Comparing the performance of simple distributional features of a time series provides important context for interpreting the performance of complex time-series classification models, which may not always be required to obtain high accuracy.
The information bottleneck (IB) method offers an attractive framework for understanding representation learning, however its applications are often limited by its computational intractability. Analytical characterization of the IB method is not only of practical interest, but it can also lead to new insights into learning phenomena. Here we consider a generalized IB problem, in which the mutual information in the original IB method is replaced by correlation measures based on Renyi and Jeffreys divergences. We derive an exact analytical IB solution for the case of Gaussian correlated variables. Our analysis reveals a series of structural transitions, similar to those previously observed in the original IB case. We find further that although solving the original, Renyi and Jeffreys IB problems yields different representations in general, the structural transitions occur at the same critical tradeoff parameters, and the Renyi and Jeffreys IB solutions perform well under the original IB objective. Our results suggest that formulating the IB method with alternative correlation measures could offer a strategy for obtaining an approximate solution to the original IB problem.
Modeling multivariate time series has long been a subject that has attracted researchers from a diverse range of fields including economics, finance, and traffic. A basic assumption behind multivariate time series forecasting is that its variables depend on one another but, upon looking closely, it is fair to say that existing methods fail to fully exploit latent spatial dependencies between pairs of variables. In recent years, meanwhile, graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown high capability in handling relational dependencies. GNNs require well-defined graph structures for information propagation which means they cannot be applied directly for multivariate time series where the dependencies are not known in advance. In this paper, we propose a general graph neural network framework designed specifically for multivariate time series data. Our approach automatically extracts the uni-directed relations among variables through a graph learning module, into which external knowledge like variable attributes can be easily integrated. A novel mix-hop propagation layer and a dilated inception layer are further proposed to capture the spatial and temporal dependencies within the time series. The graph learning, graph convolution, and temporal convolution modules are jointly learned in an end-to-end framework. Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline methods on 3 of 4 benchmark datasets and achieves on-par performance with other approaches on two traffic datasets which provide extra structural information.
Knowledge graph completion aims to predict missing relations between entities in a knowledge graph. While many different methods have been proposed, there is a lack of a unifying framework that would lead to state-of-the-art results. Here we develop PathCon, a knowledge graph completion method that harnesses four novel insights to outperform existing methods. PathCon predicts relations between a pair of entities by: (1) Considering the Relational Context of each entity by capturing the relation types adjacent to the entity and modeled through a novel edge-based message passing scheme; (2) Considering the Relational Paths capturing all paths between the two entities; And, (3) adaptively integrating the Relational Context and Relational Path through a learnable attention mechanism. Importantly, (4) in contrast to conventional node-based representations, PathCon represents context and path only using the relation types, which makes it applicable in an inductive setting. Experimental results on knowledge graph benchmarks as well as our newly proposed dataset show that PathCon outperforms state-of-the-art knowledge graph completion methods by a large margin. Finally, PathCon is able to provide interpretable explanations by identifying relations that provide the context and paths that are important for a given predicted relation.
Time Series Classification (TSC) is an important and challenging problem in data mining. With the increase of time series data availability, hundreds of TSC algorithms have been proposed. Among these methods, only a few have considered Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to perform this task. This is surprising as deep learning has seen very successful applications in the last years. DNNs have indeed revolutionized the field of computer vision especially with the advent of novel deeper architectures such as Residual and Convolutional Neural Networks. Apart from images, sequential data such as text and audio can also be processed with DNNs to reach state-of-the-art performance for document classification and speech recognition. In this article, we study the current state-of-the-art performance of deep learning algorithms for TSC by presenting an empirical study of the most recent DNN architectures for TSC. We give an overview of the most successful deep learning applications in various time series domains under a unified taxonomy of DNNs for TSC. We also provide an open source deep learning framework to the TSC community where we implemented each of the compared approaches and evaluated them on a univariate TSC benchmark (the UCR/UEA archive) and 12 multivariate time series datasets. By training 8,730 deep learning models on 97 time series datasets, we propose the most exhaustive study of DNNs for TSC to date.
The prevalence of networked sensors and actuators in many real-world systems such as smart buildings, factories, power plants, and data centers generate substantial amounts of multivariate time series data for these systems. The rich sensor data can be continuously monitored for intrusion events through anomaly detection. However, conventional threshold-based anomaly detection methods are inadequate due to the dynamic complexities of these systems, while supervised machine learning methods are unable to exploit the large amounts of data due to the lack of labeled data. On the other hand, current unsupervised machine learning approaches have not fully exploited the spatial-temporal correlation and other dependencies amongst the multiple variables (sensors/actuators) in the system for detecting anomalies. In this work, we propose an unsupervised multivariate anomaly detection method based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Instead of treating each data stream independently, our proposed MAD-GAN framework considers the entire variable set concurrently to capture the latent interactions amongst the variables. We also fully exploit both the generator and discriminator produced by the GAN, using a novel anomaly score called DR-score to detect anomalies by discrimination and reconstruction. We have tested our proposed MAD-GAN using two recent datasets collected from real-world CPS: the Secure Water Treatment (SWaT) and the Water Distribution (WADI) datasets. Our experimental results showed that the proposed MAD-GAN is effective in reporting anomalies caused by various cyber-intrusions compared in these complex real-world systems.
Multivariate time series forecasting is extensively studied throughout the years with ubiquitous applications in areas such as finance, traffic, environment, etc. Still, concerns have been raised on traditional methods for incapable of modeling complex patterns or dependencies lying in real word data. To address such concerns, various deep learning models, mainly Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based methods, are proposed. Nevertheless, capturing extremely long-term patterns while effectively incorporating information from other variables remains a challenge for time-series forecasting. Furthermore, lack-of-explainability remains one serious drawback for deep neural network models. Inspired by Memory Network proposed for solving the question-answering task, we propose a deep learning based model named Memory Time-series network (MTNet) for time series forecasting. MTNet consists of a large memory component, three separate encoders, and an autoregressive component to train jointly. Additionally, the attention mechanism designed enable MTNet to be highly interpretable. We can easily tell which part of the historic data is referenced the most.