Exploratory Time Series Data Mining by Genetic Clustering

Abstract

In this chapter, we present genetic algorithm (GA) based methods developed for clustering univariate time series with equal or unequal length as an exploratory step of data mining. These methods basically implement the k-medoids algorithm. Each chromosome encodes in binary the data objects serving as the k-medoids. To compare their performance, both fixed-parameter and adaptive GAs were used. We first employed the synthetic control chart data set to investigate the performance of three fitness functions, two distance measures, and other GA parameters such as population size, crossover rate, and mutation rate. Two more sets of time series with or without known number of clusters were also experimented: one is the cylinder-bell-funnel data and the other is the novel battle simulation data. The clustering results are presented and discussed.