Using derivatives in time series classification

Over recent years the popularity of time series has soared. Given the widespread use of modern information technology, a large number of time series may be collected during business, medical or biological operations, for example. As a consequence there has been a dramatic increase in the amount of interest in querying and mining such data, which in turn has resulted in a large number of works introducing new methodologies for indexing, classification, clustering and approximation of time series. In particular, many new distance measures between time series have been introduced. In this paper, we propose a new distance function based on a derivative. In contrast to well-known measures from the literature, our approach considers the general shape of a time series rather than point-to-point function comparison. The new distance is used in classification with the nearest neighbor rule. In order to provide a comprehensive comparison, we conducted a set of experiments, testing effectiveness on 20 time series datasets from a wide variety of application domains. Our experiments show that our method provides a higher quality of classification on most of the examined datasets.