MS-Index: Fast Top-k Subsequence Search for Multivariate Time Series under Euclidean Distance

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: d'Hondt, Jens E., Kortekaas, Teun, Papapetrou, Odysseas, Palpanas, Themis
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author d'Hondt, Jens E.
Kortekaas, Teun
Papapetrou, Odysseas
Palpanas, Themis
author_facet d'Hondt, Jens E.
Kortekaas, Teun
Papapetrou, Odysseas
Palpanas, Themis
contents Modern applications frequently collect and analyze temporal data in the form of multivariate time series (MTS) -- time series that contain multiple channels. A common task in this context is subsequence search, which involves identifying all MTS that contain subsequences highly similar to a query time series. In practical scenarios, not all channels of an MTS are relevant to every query. For instance, airplane sensors may gather data on a plethora of components and subsystems, but only a few of these are relevant to a specific query, such as identifying the cause of a malfunctioning landing gear, or a specific flight maneuver. Consequently, the relevant query channels are often specified at query time. In this work, we introduce the Multivariate Subsequence Index (MS-Index), a novel algorithm for nearest neighbor MTS subsequence search under Euclidean distance that supports ad-hoc selection of query channels. The algorithm is exact and demonstrates query performance that scales sublinearly to the number of query channels. We examine the properties of \name with a thorough experimental evaluation over 34 datasets, and show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art one to two orders of magnitude for both raw and normalized subsequences.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_14723
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MS-Index: Fast Top-k Subsequence Search for Multivariate Time Series under Euclidean Distance
d'Hondt, Jens E.
Kortekaas, Teun
Papapetrou, Odysseas
Palpanas, Themis
Databases
Modern applications frequently collect and analyze temporal data in the form of multivariate time series (MTS) -- time series that contain multiple channels. A common task in this context is subsequence search, which involves identifying all MTS that contain subsequences highly similar to a query time series. In practical scenarios, not all channels of an MTS are relevant to every query. For instance, airplane sensors may gather data on a plethora of components and subsystems, but only a few of these are relevant to a specific query, such as identifying the cause of a malfunctioning landing gear, or a specific flight maneuver. Consequently, the relevant query channels are often specified at query time. In this work, we introduce the Multivariate Subsequence Index (MS-Index), a novel algorithm for nearest neighbor MTS subsequence search under Euclidean distance that supports ad-hoc selection of query channels. The algorithm is exact and demonstrates query performance that scales sublinearly to the number of query channels. We examine the properties of \name with a thorough experimental evaluation over 34 datasets, and show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art one to two orders of magnitude for both raw and normalized subsequences.
title MS-Index: Fast Top-k Subsequence Search for Multivariate Time Series under Euclidean Distance
topic Databases
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.14723