Segment-based approach for subsequence searches in sequence databases

This paper deals with the subsequence searching problem under time-warping in sequence databases. Our work is motivated by the observation that subsequence searches slow down quadratically as the average length of data sequences increases. To resolve this problem, the Segment-Based Approach for Subsequence Searches (SBASS) is proposed. The SBASS divides data and query sequences into a series of pair-wise segments, and retrieves all data subsequences that satisfy the two conditions: 1) the number of segments is the same as the number of segments in a query sequence, and 2) the distance of every segment pair is less than or equal to a tolerance. Our segmentation scheme allows segments to have different lengths; thus we employ the time warping distance as a similarity measure for each segment pair. For efficient retrieval of similar subsequences, we extract feature vectors from all data segments exploiting their monotonically changing properties, and build a spatial index using feature ve...