Interpretable Transformation and Analysis of Timelines through Learning via Surprisability

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Mokryn, Osnat, Lazebnik, Teddy, Shoshan, Hagit Ben
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Mokryn, Osnat
Lazebnik, Teddy
Shoshan, Hagit Ben
author_facet Mokryn, Osnat
Lazebnik, Teddy
Shoshan, Hagit Ben
contents The analysis of high-dimensional timeline data and the identification of outliers and anomalies is critical across diverse domains, including sensor readings, biological and medical data, historical records, and global statistics. However, conventional analysis techniques often struggle with challenges such as high dimensionality, complex distributions, and sparsity. These limitations hinder the ability to extract meaningful insights from complex temporal datasets, making it difficult to identify trending features, outliers, and anomalies effectively. Inspired by surprisability -- a cognitive science concept describing how humans instinctively focus on unexpected deviations - we propose Learning via Surprisability (LvS), a novel approach for transforming high-dimensional timeline data. LvS quantifies and prioritizes anomalies in time-series data by formalizing deviations from expected behavior. LvS bridges cognitive theories of attention with computational methods, enabling the detection of anomalies and shifts in a way that preserves critical context, offering a new lens for interpreting complex datasets. We demonstrate the usefulness of LvS on three high-dimensional timeline use cases: a time series of sensor data, a global dataset of mortality causes over multiple years, and a textual corpus containing over two centuries of State of the Union Addresses by U.S. presidents. Our results show that the LvS transformation enables efficient and interpretable identification of outliers, anomalies, and the most variable features along the timeline.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_04502
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Interpretable Transformation and Analysis of Timelines through Learning via Surprisability
Mokryn, Osnat
Lazebnik, Teddy
Shoshan, Hagit Ben
Methodology
Artificial Intelligence
Information Theory
The analysis of high-dimensional timeline data and the identification of outliers and anomalies is critical across diverse domains, including sensor readings, biological and medical data, historical records, and global statistics. However, conventional analysis techniques often struggle with challenges such as high dimensionality, complex distributions, and sparsity. These limitations hinder the ability to extract meaningful insights from complex temporal datasets, making it difficult to identify trending features, outliers, and anomalies effectively. Inspired by surprisability -- a cognitive science concept describing how humans instinctively focus on unexpected deviations - we propose Learning via Surprisability (LvS), a novel approach for transforming high-dimensional timeline data. LvS quantifies and prioritizes anomalies in time-series data by formalizing deviations from expected behavior. LvS bridges cognitive theories of attention with computational methods, enabling the detection of anomalies and shifts in a way that preserves critical context, offering a new lens for interpreting complex datasets. We demonstrate the usefulness of LvS on three high-dimensional timeline use cases: a time series of sensor data, a global dataset of mortality causes over multiple years, and a textual corpus containing over two centuries of State of the Union Addresses by U.S. presidents. Our results show that the LvS transformation enables efficient and interpretable identification of outliers, anomalies, and the most variable features along the timeline.
title Interpretable Transformation and Analysis of Timelines through Learning via Surprisability
topic Methodology
Artificial Intelligence
Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04502