Mining for weak periodic signals in time series databases

Abstract

Periodicity is a particularly interesting feature, which is often inherent in real world time series data sets. In this article we propose a data mining technique for detecting multiple partial and approximate periodicities. Our approach is exploratory and follows a filter/refine paradigm. In the filter phase we introduce an autocorrelation-based algorithm that produces a set of candidate partial periodicities. The algorithm is extended to capture approximate periodicities. In the refine phase we effectively prune invalid periodicities. We conducted a series of experiments with various real-world data sets to test the performance and verify the quality of the results.