Deep time-series clustering via latent representation alignment

Abstract

In practice, obtaining sufficient label information from a dataset is challenging. Consequently, various clustering methods have been studied to homogeneously group data without label information. Recently, deep clustering approaches that utilize deep neural networks have garnered considerable attention. However, time series data possess unique characteristics, including temporal relationships between observations in a sequence, which can decrease the performance of existing deep clustering methods when applied to time series. Despite this, few studies on deep clustering have addressed the characteristics of time series. Thus, we propose a novel approach for deep time-series clustering using topological information, enabling the capture of underlying temporal patterns to generate cluster-oriented representations. We address the topological information of a time series by introducing a novel loss function based on the eigendecomposition of representations in latent space. Through experiments on various time-series datasets, we demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method in achieving superior clustering performance compared to state-of-the-art deep clustering methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach that utilizes topological information for deep time-series clustering.