Encoding Temporal Markov Dynamics in Graph for Time Series Visualization

Time series is attracting more attention across statistics, machine learning and pattern recognition as it appears widely in both industry and academia, but few advances has been achieved in effective time series visualization due to its temporal dimensionality and complex dynamics. Inspired by recent effort on using network metrics to characterize time series for classification, we present an approach to visualize time series as complex networks based on first order Markov process and temporal ordering. Different to classical bar charts, line plots and other statistics based graph, our approach delivers more intuitive visualization that better preserves both the temporal dependency and frequency structures. It provides a natural inverse operation to map the graph back to time series, making it possible to use graph statistics to characterize time series for better visual exploration and statistical analysis. Our experimental results suggest the effectiveness on various tasks such as system identification, classification and anomaly detection on both synthetic and the real time series data.