A Transferable Technique for Detecting and Localising Segments of Repeating Patterns in Time series

In time series data, consecutively repeated patterns occur in many applications, including activity recognition from wearable sensors. Repeating patterns may vary over time and present in various shapes and sizes, which makes their detection a challenging problem. We develop a novel technique, RP-Mask, that can detect and localise segments of consecutively repeated patterns, without prior knowledge about the shape and length of the repeats. Our technique represents time series using recurrence plots (RP), a method for visualising repetition in time series. We identify two key features of recurrence plots-checkerboard patterns and vertical/horizontal lines marking the start and end of checkerboard patterns. We use object recognition on RP images to detect and localise the checkerboard patterns, which are mapped to the segments of consecutively repeating patterns on the underlying time series. Since the collection and labeling of a real world dataset that exhibits all possible variations of a repetition is prohibitive, we demonstrate that our model is able to effectively learn from synthetically curated data and perform equally effective on a real world dataset, while it is noise tolerant. We compare our method to a number of state-of-the-art techniques and show that our method outperforms the state of the art both when trained using real activity recognition and synthetic data.