Aggregating time partitions

Partitions of sequential data exist either per se or as a result of sequence segmentation algorithms. It is often the case that the same timeline is partitioned in many different ways. For example, different segmentation algorithms produce different partitions of the same underlying data points. In such cases, we are interested in producing an aggregate partition, i.e., a segmentation that agrees as much as possible with the input segmentations. Each partition is defined as a set of continuous non-overlapping segments of the timeline. We show that this problem can be solved optimally in polynomial time using dynamic programming. We also propose faster greedy heuristics that work well in practice. We experiment with our algorithms and we demonstrate their utility in clustering the behavior of mobile-phone users and combining the results of different segmentation algorithms on genomic sequences. Categories and Subject Descriptors: F.2.2 [ANALYSIS OF ALGORITHMS AND PROBLEM COMPLEXITY]: N...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: KDD
• Authors: Evimaria Terzi, Panayiotis Tsaparas, Taneli Mielikäinen
• Keywords: ALGORITHMS AND PROBLEM, Data Mining, KDD 2006, Nonnumerical Algorithms, Sequence Segmentation Algorithms