Matrix Profile VI: Meaningful Multidimensional Motif Discovery

Time series motifs are approximately repeating patterns in real-valued time series data. They are useful for exploratory data mining and are often used as inputs for various time series clustering, classification, segmentation, rule discovery, and visualization algorithms. Since the introduction of the first motif discovery algorithm for univariate time series in 2002, multiple efforts have been made to generalize motifs to the multidimensional case. In this work, we show that these efforts, which typically attempt to find motifs on all dimensions, will not produce meaningful motifs except in the most contrived situations. We explain this finding and introduce mSTAMP, an algorithm that allows meaningful discovery of multidimensional motifs. Beyond producing objectively and subjectively meaningful results, our algorithm has a host of additional advantages, including being much faster, requiring fewer parameters and supporting streaming data. We demonstrate the utility of our mSTAMP-based motif discovery framework on domains as diverse as audio processing, industry, and sports analytics.