Dynamic Data Augmentation with Gating Networks for Time Series Recognition

Data augmentation is a technique to improve the generalization ability of machine learning methods by increasing the size of the dataset. However, since every augmentation method is not equally effective for every dataset, you need to select an appropriate method carefully. We propose a neural network that dynamically selects the best combination of data augmentation methods using a Gating Network and a mutually beneficial feature consistency loss. The Gating Network is able to control how much of each data augmentation is used for the representation within the network. The feature consistency loss gives a constraint that augmented features from the same input pattern should be in similar. In the experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on the 12 largest time-series datasets from 2018 UCR Time Series Archive and reveal the relationships between the data augmentation methods through analysis of the proposed method.