On efficiently searching trajectories and archival data for historical similarities.

We study the problem of efficiently evaluating similarity queries on histories, where a history is a d-dimensional time series for d ≥ 1. While there are some solutions for time-series and spatio-temporal trajectories where typically d ≤ 3, we are not aware of any work that examines the problem for larger values of d. In this paper, we address the problem in its general case and propose a class of summaries for histories with a few interesting properties. First, for commonly used distance functions such as the Lp-norm, LCSS, and DTW, the summaries can be used to efficiently prune some of the histories that cannot be in the answer set of the queries. Second, histories can be indexed based on their summaries, hence the qualifying candidates can be efficiently retrieved. To further reduce the number of unnecessary distance computations for false positives, we propose a finer level approximation of histories, and an algorithm to find an approximation with the least maximum distance estimation error. Experimental results confirm that the combination of our feature extraction approaches and the indexability of our summaries can improve upon existing methods and scales up for larger values of d and database sizes, based on our experiments on real and synthetic datasets of 17-dimensional histories.