Sequence-to-Sequence Model with Attention for Time Series Classification

Encouraged by recent waves of successful applications of deep learning, some researchers have demonstrated the effectiveness of applying convolutional neural networks (CNN) to time series classification problems. However, CNN and other traditional methods require the input data to be of the same dimension which prevents its direct application on data of various lengths and multi-channel time series with different sampling rates across channels. Long short-term memory (LSTM), another tool in the deep learning arsenal and with its design nature, is more appropriate for problems involving time series such as speech recognition and language translation. In this paper, we propose a novel model incorporating a sequence-to-sequence model that consists two LSTMs, one encoder and one decoder. The encoder LSTM accepts input time series of arbitrary lengths, extracts information from the raw data and based on which the decoder LSTM constructs fixed length sequences that can be regarded as discriminatory features. For better utilization of the raw data, we also introduce the attention mechanism into our model so that the feature generation process can peek at the raw data and focus its attention on the part of the raw data that is most relevant to the feature under construction. We call our model S2SwA, as the short for Sequence-to-Sequence with Attention. We test S2SwA on both uni-channel and multi-channel time series datasets and show that our model is competitive with the state-of-the-art in real world tasks such as human activity recognition.