Adversarial Dynamic Shapelet Networks

Shapelets are discriminative subsequences for time series classification. Recently, learning time-series shapelets (LTS) was proposed to learn shapelets by gradient descent directly. Although learning-based shapelet methods achieve better results than previous methods, they still have two shortcomings. First, the learned shapelets are fixed after training and cannot adapt to time series with deformations at the testing phase. Second, the shapelets learned by back-propagation may not be similar to any real subsequences, which is contrary to the original intention of shapelets and reduces model interpretability. In this paper, we propose a novel shapelet learning model called Adversarial Dynamic Shapelet Networks (ADSNs). An adversarial training strategy is employed to prevent the generated shapelets from diverging from the actual subsequences of a time series. During inference, a shapelet generator produces sample-specific shapelets, and a dynamic shapelet transformation uses the generated shapelets to extract discriminative features. Thus, ADSN can dynamically generate shapelets that are similar to the real subsequences rather than having arbitrary shapes. The proposed model has high modeling flexibility while retaining the interpretability of shapelet-based methods. Experiments conducted on extensive time series data sets show that ADSN is state-of-the-art compared to existing shapelet-based methods. The visualization analysis also shows the effectiveness of dynamic shapelet generation and adversarial training.