A new similarity measurement method for time series based on image fusion of recurrence plots and wavelet scalogram

The core of data series classification and clustering is how to evaluate the similarity between time series. However, for one-dimensional time series, the vast majority of similarity measurement methods currently relied on one-dimensional information. Although some classifications of time series were achieved by the images transformed from time series, they mostly relied on a single imaging mechanism (time domain or frequency domain). In order to give a new idea for time series similarity measurement, this paper proposed a similarity measurement method of time series based on the fused images. According to recurrence plots (RP) and wavelet scalogram (WS), the original time series was first transformed into images. Then, RP and WS were fused into an image. Next, the feature in the image was extracted by ResNet-18. Finally, the similarity of the time series can be obtained by the Euclidean distance between the features extracted by ResNet-18. The proposed method was verified by the time series from UCR Time Series Classification/Clustering Homepage. The results showed that the similarity measurement of time series can be effectively improved by fusing the images obtained by different imaging mechanisms in the time domain and frequency domain.