A local segmented dynamic time warping distance measure algorithm for time series data mining

Similarity measure between time series is a key issue in data mining of time series database. Euclidean distance measure is typically used init. However, the measure is an extremely brittle distance measure. Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is proposed to deal with this case, but its expensive computation limits its application in massive datasets. In this paper, we present a new distance measure algorithm, called local segmented dynamic time warping (LSDTW), which is based on viewing the local DTW measure at the segment level. The DTW measure between the two segments is the product of the square of the distance between their mean times the number of points of the longer segment. Experiments about cluster analysis on the basis of this algorithm were implemented on a synthetic and a real world dataset comparing with Euclidean and classical DTW measure. The experiment results show that the new algorithm gives better computational performance in comparison to classical DTW with no loss of accuracy.