Bayesian mixture of AR models for time series clustering

In this paper, we propose a Bayesian framework for estimation of parameters of a mixture of autoregressive models for time series clustering. The proposed approach is based on variational principles and provides a tractable approximation to the true posterior density that minimizes Kullback-Liebler (KL) divergence with respect to prior distribution. This method simultaneously addresses the model complexity and parameter estimation problems. The proposed approach is applied both on simulated and real-world time series datasets. It is found to be useful in exploring and finding the true number of underlying clusters, starting from an arbitrarily large number of clusters.