Time series clustering is the act of grouping time series data without recourse to a label. Algorithms that cluster time series can be classified into two groups: those that employ a time series specific distance measure; and those that derive features from time series. Both approaches usually rely on traditional clustering algorithms such as $k$-means. Our focus is on distance based time series that employ elastic distance measures, i.e. distances that perform some kind of realignment whilst measuring distance. We describe nine commonly used elastic distance measures and compare their performance with k-means and k-medoids clustering. Our findings are surprising. The most popular technique, dynamic time warping (DTW), performs worse than Euclidean distance with k-means, and even when tuned, is no better. Using k-medoids rather than k-means improved the clusterings for all nine distance measures. DTW is not significantly better than Euclidean distance with k-medoids. Generally, distance measures that employ editing in conjunction with warping perform better, and one distance measure, the move-split-merge (MSM) method, is the best performing measure of this study. We also compare to clustering with DTW using barycentre averaging (DBA). We find that DBA does improve DTW k-means, but that the standard DBA is still worse than using MSM. Our conclusion is to recommend MSM with k-medoids as the benchmark algorithm for clustering time series with elastic distance measures. We provide implementations in the aeon toolkit, results and guidance on reproducing results on the associated GitHub repository.
In this paper, we present a notion of differential privacy (DP) for data that comes from different classes. Here, the class-membership is private information that needs to be protected. The proposed method is an output perturbation mechanism that adds noise to the release of query response such that the analyst is unable to infer the underlying class-label. The proposed DP method is capable of not only protecting the privacy of class-based data but also meets quality metrics of accuracy and is computationally efficient and practical. We illustrate the efficacy of the proposed method empirically while outperforming the baseline additive Gaussian noise mechanism. We also examine a real-world application and apply the proposed DP method to the autoregression and moving average (ARMA) forecasting method, protecting the privacy of the underlying data source. Case studies on the real-world advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) measurements of household power consumption validate the excellent performance of the proposed DP method while also satisfying the accuracy of forecasted power consumption measurements.
The increasing availability of graph-structured data motivates the task of optimising over functions defined on the node set of graphs. Traditional graph search algorithms can be applied in this case, but they may be sample-inefficient and do not make use of information about the function values; on the other hand, Bayesian optimisation is a class of promising black-box solvers with superior sample efficiency, but it has been scarcely been applied to such novel setups. To fill this gap, we propose a novel Bayesian optimisation framework that optimises over functions defined on generic, large-scale and potentially unknown graphs. Through the learning of suitable kernels on graphs, our framework has the advantage of adapting to the behaviour of the target function. The local modelling approach further guarantees the efficiency of our method. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed optimisation framework.
Verification of discrete time or continuous time dynamical systems over the reals is known to be undecidable. It is however known that undecidability does not hold for various classes of systems: if robustness is defined as the fact that reachability relation is stable under infinitesimal perturbation, then their reachability relation is decidable. In other words, undecidability implies sensitivity under infinitesimal perturbation, a property usually not expected in systems considered in practice, and hence can be seen (somehow informally) as an artefact of the theory, that always assumes exactness. In a similar vein, it is known that, while undecidability holds for logical formulas over the reals, it does not hold when considering delta-undecidability: one must determine whether a property is true, or $\delta$-far from being true. We first extend the previous statements to a theory for general (discrete time, continuous-time, and even hybrid) dynamical systems, and we relate the two approaches. We also relate robustness to some geometric properties of reachability relation. But mainly, when a system is robust, it then makes sense to quantify at which level of perturbation. We prove that assuming robustness to polynomial perturbations on precision leads to reachability verifiable in complexity class PSPACE, and even to a characterization of this complexity class. We prove that assuming robustness to polynomial perturbations on time or length of trajectories leads to similar statements, but with PTIME. It has been recently unexpectedly shown that the length of a solution of a polynomial ordinary differential equation corresponds to a time of computation: PTIME corresponds to solutions of polynomial differential equations of polynomial length. Our results argue that the answer is given by precision: space corresponds to the involved precision.
Crystallographic groups describe the symmetries of crystals and other repetitive structures encountered in nature and the sciences. These groups include the wallpaper and space groups. We derive linear and nonlinear representations of functions that are (1) smooth and (2) invariant under such a group. The linear representation generalizes the Fourier basis to crystallographically invariant basis functions. We show that such a basis exists for each crystallographic group, that it is orthonormal in the relevant $L_2$ space, and recover the standard Fourier basis as a special case for pure shift groups. The nonlinear representation embeds the orbit space of the group into a finite-dimensional Euclidean space. We show that such an embedding exists for every crystallographic group, and that it factors functions through a generalization of a manifold called an orbifold. We describe algorithms that, given a standardized description of the group, compute the Fourier basis and an embedding map. As examples, we construct crystallographically invariant neural networks, kernel machines, and Gaussian processes.
Denoising is intuitively related to projection. Indeed, under the manifold hypothesis, adding random noise is approximately equivalent to orthogonal perturbation. Hence, learning to denoise is approximately learning to project. In this paper, we use this observation to reinterpret denoising diffusion models as approximate gradient descent applied to the Euclidean distance function. We then provide straight-forward convergence analysis of the DDIM sampler under simple assumptions on the projection-error of the denoiser. Finally, we propose a new sampler based on two simple modifications to DDIM using insights from our theoretical results. In as few as 5-10 function evaluations, our sampler achieves state-of-the-art FID scores on pretrained CIFAR-10 and CelebA models and can generate high quality samples on latent diffusion models.
Neural networks have shown tremendous growth in recent years to solve numerous problems. Various types of neural networks have been introduced to deal with different types of problems. However, the main goal of any neural network is to transform the non-linearly separable input data into more linearly separable abstract features using a hierarchy of layers. These layers are combinations of linear and nonlinear functions. The most popular and common non-linearity layers are activation functions (AFs), such as Logistic Sigmoid, Tanh, ReLU, ELU, Swish and Mish. In this paper, a comprehensive overview and survey is presented for AFs in neural networks for deep learning. Different classes of AFs such as Logistic Sigmoid and Tanh based, ReLU based, ELU based, and Learning based are covered. Several characteristics of AFs such as output range, monotonicity, and smoothness are also pointed out. A performance comparison is also performed among 18 state-of-the-art AFs with different networks on different types of data. The insights of AFs are presented to benefit the researchers for doing further research and practitioners to select among different choices. The code used for experimental comparison is released at: \url{//github.com/shivram1987/ActivationFunctions}.
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.
Reinforcement learning is one of the core components in designing an artificial intelligent system emphasizing real-time response. Reinforcement learning influences the system to take actions within an arbitrary environment either having previous knowledge about the environment model or not. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on Reinforcement Learning focusing on various dimensions including challenges, the recent development of different state-of-the-art techniques, and future directions. The fundamental objective of this paper is to provide a framework for the presentation of available methods of reinforcement learning that is informative enough and simple to follow for the new researchers and academics in this domain considering the latest concerns. First, we illustrated the core techniques of reinforcement learning in an easily understandable and comparable way. Finally, we analyzed and depicted the recent developments in reinforcement learning approaches. My analysis pointed out that most of the models focused on tuning policy values rather than tuning other things in a particular state of reasoning.
Clustering is one of the most fundamental and wide-spread techniques in exploratory data analysis. Yet, the basic approach to clustering has not really changed: a practitioner hand-picks a task-specific clustering loss to optimize and fit the given data to reveal the underlying cluster structure. Some types of losses---such as k-means, or its non-linear version: kernelized k-means (centroid based), and DBSCAN (density based)---are popular choices due to their good empirical performance on a range of applications. Although every so often the clustering output using these standard losses fails to reveal the underlying structure, and the practitioner has to custom-design their own variation. In this work we take an intrinsically different approach to clustering: rather than fitting a dataset to a specific clustering loss, we train a recurrent model that learns how to cluster. The model uses as training pairs examples of datasets (as input) and its corresponding cluster identities (as output). By providing multiple types of training datasets as inputs, our model has the ability to generalize well on unseen datasets (new clustering tasks). Our experiments reveal that by training on simple synthetically generated datasets or on existing real datasets, we can achieve better clustering performance on unseen real-world datasets when compared with standard benchmark clustering techniques. Our meta clustering model works well even for small datasets where the usual deep learning models tend to perform worse.
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.