State-space dynamics distance for clustering sequential data Articles uri icon

publication date

  • May 2011

start page

  • 1014

end page

  • 1022

issue

  • 5

volume

  • 44

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 0031-3203

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 1873-5142

abstract

  • This paper proposes a novel similarity measure for clustering sequential data. We first construct a common state space by training a single probabilistic model with all the sequences in order to get a unified representation for the dataset. Then, distances are obtained attending to the transition matrices induced by each sequence in that state space. This approach solves some of the usual overfitting and scalability issues of the existing semi-parametric techniques that rely on training a model for each sequence. Empirical studies on both synthetic and real-world datasets illustrate the advantages of the proposed similarity measure for clustering sequences.