Book Image

Time Series Indexing

By : Mihalis Tsoukalos
Book Image

Time Series Indexing

By: Mihalis Tsoukalos

Overview of this book

Time series are everywhere, ranging from financial data and system metrics to weather stations and medical records. Being able to access, search, and compare time series data quickly is essential, and this comprehensive guide enables you to do just that by helping you explore SAX representation and the most effective time series index, iSAX. The book begins by teaching you about the implementation of SAX representation in Python as well as the iSAX index, along with the required theory sourced from academic research papers. The chapters are filled with figures and plots to help you follow the presented topics and understand key concepts easily. But what makes this book really great is that it contains the right amount of knowledge about time series indexing using the right amount of theory and practice so that you can work with time series and develop time series indexes successfully. Additionally, the presented code can be easily ported to any other modern programming language, such as Swift, Java, C, C++, Ruby, Kotlin, Go, Rust, and JavaScript. By the end of this book, you'll have learned how to harness the power of iSAX and SAX representation to efficiently index and analyze time series data and will be equipped to develop your own time series indexes and effectively work with time series data.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

What is an index and why do we need indexing?

Can you imagine searching for a surname in an unsorted list of names? Can you imagine looking for a book in a library that does not sort its books based on book subject (the Dewey system) and then book title and author surname? I cannot! Both examples showcase a naïve but efficient indexing scheme. The more complex the data, the more sophisticated the index should be in order to perform quick searches and maybe updates on the data.

Figure 1.2 shows the visualization of a really small iSAX index – in reality, as a time series can be really huge, iSAX indexes tend to be much bigger and more complex.

Figure 1.2 – A small iSAX index

Figure 1.2 – A small iSAX index

Do not try to understand the iSAX index or the titles of the nodes at this point. Everything is going to become clearer in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3. For now, keep in mind that the titles of the nodes are SAX words and that there exist two kinds of nodes on an iSAX...