NP-Free: A Real-Time Normalization-free and Parameter-tuning-free Representation Approach for Open-ended Time Series

To help analyze time series in data mining applications, many time series representation approaches have been proposed to convert a raw time series into another series for representing the original time series. However, existing approaches are not designed for open-ended time series (which is a sequence of data points being continuously collected at a fixed interval without any length limit) because these approaches need to know the total length of the target time series in advance and preprocess the entire time series using a normalization method. Furthermore, many representation approaches require users to configure and tune some parameters beforehand in order to achieve satisfactory representation results. In this paper, we propose NP-Free, a real-time Normalization-free and Parameter-tuning-free representation approach for open-ended time series. Without needing to use any normalization method or tune any parameter, NP-Free can generate a representation for a raw time series on the fly by converting each data point of the time series into a root-mean-square error (RMSE) value based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and a Look-Back and Predict-Forward strategy. To demonstrate the capability of NP-Free in representing time series, we conducted several experiments based on real-world open-source time series datasets. We also evaluated the time consumption of NP-Free in generating representations.