K-MDTSC: K-Multi-Dimensional Time-Series Clustering Algorithm

Abstract

The increasing capability to collect data gives us the possibility to collect a massive amount of heterogeneous data. Among the heterogeneous data available, time-series represents a mother lode of information yet to be fully explored. Current data mining techniques have several shortcomings while analyzing time-series, especially when more than one time-series, i.e., multi-dimensional timeseries, should be analyzed together to extract knowledge from the data. In this context, we present K-MDTSC (K-Multi-Dimensional Time-Series Clustering), a novel clustering algorithm specifically designed to deal with multi-dimensional time-series. Firstly, we demonstrate K-MDTSC capability to group multi-dimensional time-series using synthetic datasets. We compare K-MDTSC results with k-Shape, a state-of-art time-series clustering algorithm based on K-means. Our results show both K-MDTSC and k-Shape create good clustering results. However, K-MDTSC outperforms k-Shape when complicating the synthetic dataset. Secondly, we apply K-MDTSC in a real case scenario where we are asked to replace a scheduled maintenance with a predictive approach. To this end, we create a generalized pipeline to process data from a real industrial plant welding process. We apply K-MDTSC to create clusters of weldings based on their welding shape. Our results show that K-MDTSC identifies different welding profiles, but that the aging of the electrode does not negatively impact the welding process.