Maximum likelihood estimation of burst-merging kernels for bursty time series

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Birhanu, Tibebe, Jo, Hang-Hyun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915918211186688
author Birhanu, Tibebe
Jo, Hang-Hyun
author_facet Birhanu, Tibebe
Jo, Hang-Hyun
contents Various time series in natural and social processes have been found to be bursty. Events in the time series rapidly occur within short time periods, forming bursts, which are alternated with long inactive periods. As the timescale defining bursts increases, individual events are sequentially merged to become small bursts and then bigger ones, eventually leading to the single burst containing all events. Such a merging pattern has been depicted by a tree that fully reveals the hierarchical structure of bursts, thus called a burst tree. The burst-tree structure can be simply characterized by a burst-merging kernel that dictates which bursts are merged together as the timescale increases. In this work, we develop the maximum likelihood estimation method of the burst-merging kernel from time series, which is successfully tested against the time series generated using several model kernels. We also apply our method to some empirical time series from various backgrounds. Our method provides a useful tool to precisely characterize the time series data, hence enabling to study their underlying mechanisms more accurately.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_14861
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Maximum likelihood estimation of burst-merging kernels for bursty time series
Birhanu, Tibebe
Jo, Hang-Hyun
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Various time series in natural and social processes have been found to be bursty. Events in the time series rapidly occur within short time periods, forming bursts, which are alternated with long inactive periods. As the timescale defining bursts increases, individual events are sequentially merged to become small bursts and then bigger ones, eventually leading to the single burst containing all events. Such a merging pattern has been depicted by a tree that fully reveals the hierarchical structure of bursts, thus called a burst tree. The burst-tree structure can be simply characterized by a burst-merging kernel that dictates which bursts are merged together as the timescale increases. In this work, we develop the maximum likelihood estimation method of the burst-merging kernel from time series, which is successfully tested against the time series generated using several model kernels. We also apply our method to some empirical time series from various backgrounds. Our method provides a useful tool to precisely characterize the time series data, hence enabling to study their underlying mechanisms more accurately.
title Maximum likelihood estimation of burst-merging kernels for bursty time series
topic Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14861