PaSTiLa: Scalable Parallel Algorithm for Unsupervised Labeling of Long Time Series

Abstract

Summarization aims at discovering a small set of typical subsequences (patterns) in the given long time series that represent the whole series. Further, one can implement unsupervised labeling of the given time series by assigning each subsequence a tag that corresponds to its most similar pattern. In the previous research, we developed the PSF (Parallel Snippet-Finder) algorithm for the time series summarization on GPU, where a snippet is the given-length subsequence, which is similar to many other subsequences w.r.t. the bespoke distance measure MPdist. However, PSF is limited by the demand that the snippet length be predefined by a domain expert. In this article, we introduce the novel parallel algorithm PaSTiLa (Parallel Snippet-based Time series Labeling) that discovers snippets and produces the labeling of the given time series on an HPC cluster with GPU nodes. As opposed to its predecessor, PaSTiLa employs the automatic selection of the snippet length from the specified range through our proposed heuristic criterion. In the experiments on labeling quality over time series from the TSSB (Time Series Segmentation Benchmark) dataset, PaSTiLa outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation-based competitors in average \(\textrm{F}_{1}\) score. In the case of long-length time series (typically more than 8–10 K points), PaSTiLa outruns the rivals. Finally, over the million-length time series, our algorithm demonstrates a close-to-linear speedup.