Robust histogram-based feature engineering of time series data

Collecting data at regular time nowadays is ubiquitous. The most widely used type of data that is being collected and analyzed is financial data and sensor readings. Various businesses have realized that financial time series analysis is a powerful analytical tool that can lead to competitive advantages. Likewise, sensor networks generate time series and if they are properly analyzed can give a better understanding of the processes that are being monitored. In this paper we propose a novel generic histogram-based method for feature engineering of time series data. The preprocessing phase consists of several steps: deseansonalyzing the time series data, modeling the speed of change with first derivatives, and finally calculating histograms. By doing all of those steps the goal is three-fold: achieve invariance to different factors, good modeling of the data and preform significant feature reduction. This method was applied to the AAIA Data Mining Competition 2015, which was concerned with recognition of activities carried out by firefighters by analyzing body sensor network readings. By doing that we were able to score the third place with predictive accuracy of about 83%, which was about 1% worse than the winning solution.