Prefix-querying: An approach for effective subsequence matching under time warping in sequence databases

This paper discusses an index-based subsequence matching that supports time warping in large sequence databases. Time warping enables finding sequences with similar patterns even when they are of different lengths. In our earlier work, we suggested an efficient method for whole matching under time warping. This method constructs a multidimensional index on a set of feature vectors, which are invariant to time warping, from data sequences. For filtering at feature space, it also applies a lower-bound function, which consistently underestimates the time warping distance as well as satisfies the triangular inequality. In this paper, we incorporate the prefix-querying approach based on sliding windows into the earlier approach. For indexing, we extract a feature vector from every subsequence inside a sliding window and construct a multi-dimensional index using a feature vector as indexing attributes. For query processing, we perform a series of index searches using the feature vectors of qualifying query prefixes. Our approach provides effective and scalable subsequence matching even with a large volume of a database. We also prove that our approach does not incur false dismissal. To verify the superiority of our method, we perform extensive experiments. The results reveal that our method achieves significant speedup with real-world S & P 500 stock data and with very large synthetic data.