Mining Motifs in Massive Time Series Databases Pranav Patel, Eamonn J. Keogh, Jessica Lin, and Stefano Lonardi   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Main-Track Regular Papers Abstract The problem of efficiently locating previously known patterns in a time series database (i.e., query by content) has received much attention and may now largely be regarded as a solved problem. However, from a knowledge discovery viewpoint, a more interesting problem is the enumeration of previously unknown, frequently occurring patterns. We call such patterns "motifs", because of their close analogy to their discrete counterparts in computation biology. An efficient motif discovery algorithm for time series would be useful as a tool for summarizing and visualizing massive time series databases. In addition it could be used as a subroutine in various other data mining tasks, including the discovery of association rules, clustering and classification. In this work we carefully motivate, then introduce, a non-trivial definition of time series motifs. We propose an efficient algorithm to discover them, and we demonstrate the utility and efficiency of our approach on several real world datasets. DiSC'03 © 2003 Association for Computing Machinery