Efficient moving average transform-based subsequence matching algorithms in time-series databases

Moving average transform is very useful in finding the trend of time-series data by reducing the effect of noise, and has been used in many areas such as econometrics. Previous subsequence matching methods with moving average transform, however, are problematic in that, since they must build multiple indexes in supporting transform of arbitrary order, they incur index overhead both in storage space and in update maintenance. To solve this problem, we propose a single-index approach to subsequence matching that supports moving average transform of arbitrary order in time-series databases. Using the single-index approach, we can reduce both the storage space and the index maintenance overhead. In explaining the single-index approach, we first introduce the notion of poly-order moving average transform by generalizing the original definition of moving average transform. We then formally prove the correctness of poly-order transform-based subsequence matching. We also propose two subsequence matching methods based on poly-order transform that efficiently support moving average transform of arbitrary order. Experimental results for real stock data show that, compared with the sequential scan, our methods improve average performance significantly, by a factor of 22.6-33.6. Also, compared with cases in which an index is built for every moving average order, our methods reduce storage space and maintenance effort significantly while incurring only marginal performance degradation. Our approach entails the additional advantage of being generalized to support many other transforms in addition to moving average transform. Therefore, we believe that our approach will be widely used in many transform-based subsequence matching methods. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.