Fuzzy Information Granules in Time Series Data

Often, it is desirable to represent a set of time series through typical shapes in order to detect common patterns. The algorithm presented here compares pieces of a different time series in order to find such similar shapes. The use of a fuzzy clustering technique based on fuzzy c-means allows us to detect shapes that belong to a certain group of typical shapes with a degree of membership. Modifications to the original algorithm also allow this matching to be invariant with respect to a scaling of the time series. The algorithm is demonstrated on a widely known set of data taken from the electrocardiogram (ECG) rhythm analysis experiments performed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) laboratories and on data from protein mass spectrography. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc