Mixed dissimilarity measure for piecewise linear approximation based time series applications

On the basis of empirical studies three advantages of such combined dissimilarity measures are presented. First, it is shown that the mixture ensures that MDPLA outperforms the most popular dissimilarity measures created for PLA segments. Moreover, in many cases, MDPLA provides results that makes the application of dynamic time warping (DTW) unnecessary, yielding improvement not only in accuracy but also in speed. Finally, it is demonstrated that a mixed measure, such as MDPLA, shortens the warping path of DTW and thus helps to avoid pathological warpings, i.e. the unwanted alignments of DTW. This way, DTW can be applied without penalizing or constraining the warping path itself while the chance of the unwanted alignments are significantly lowered.