Hierarchical clustering of time series data with parametric derivative dynamic time warping

• Combination of DTW and DDTW applied in a method of time series clustering.
• Specific correction algorithm for the internal cluster validation measures.
• Parameter selection for any dataset, giving the best clustering performance.

Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is a popular and efficient distance measure used in classification and clustering algorithms applied to time series data. By computing the DTW distance not on raw data but on the time series of the (first, discrete) derivative of the data, we obtain the so-called Derivative Dynamic Time Warping (DDTW) distance measure. DDTW, used alone, is usually inefficient, but there exist datasets on which DDTW gives good results, sometimes much better than DTW. To improve the performance of the two distance measures, we can combine them into a new single (parametric) distance function. The literature contains examples of the combining of DTW and DDTW in algorithms for supervised classification of time series data. In this paper, we demonstrate that combination of DTW and DDTW can also be applied in a method of time series clustering (unsupervised classification). In particular, we focus on a hierarchical clustering (with average linkage) of univariate (one-dimensional) time series data. We construct a new parametric distance function, combining DTW and DDTW, where a single real number parameter controls the contribution of each of the two measures to the total value of the combined distances. The parameter is tuned in the initial phase of the clustering algorithm. Using this technique in clustering methods requires a different approach (to address certain specific problems) than for supervised methods. In the clustering process we use three internal cluster validation measures (measures which do not use labels) and three external cluster validation measures (measures which do use clustering data labels). Internal measures are used to select an optimal value of the parameter of the algorithm, where external measures give information about the overall performance of the new method and enable comparison with other distance functions. Computational experiments are performed on a large real-world data base (UCR Time Series Classification Archive: 84 datasets) from a very broad range of fields, including medicine, finance, multimedia and engineering. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for hierarchical clustering of time series data. The method with the new parametric distance function outperforms DTW (and DDTW) on the data base used. The results are confirmed by graphical and statistical comparison.