Finding surprising patterns in a time series database in linear time and space

Abstract

The problem of finding a specified pattern in a time series database (i.e. query by content) has received much attention and is now a relatively mature field. In contrast, the important problem of enumerating all surprising or interesting patterns has received far less attention. This problem requires a meaningful definition of "surprise", and an efficient search technique. All previous attempts at finding surprising patterns in time series use a very limited notion of surprise, and/or do not scale to massive datasets. To overcome these limitations we introduce a novel technique that defines a pattern surprising if the frequency of its occurrence differs substantially from that expected by chance, given some previously seen data.