Given key performance indicators collected with fine granularity as time series, our aim is to predict and explain failures in storage environments. Although explainable predictive modeling based on spiky telemetry data is key in many domains, current approaches cannot tackle this problem. Deep learning methods suitable for sequence modeling and learning temporal dependencies, such as RNNs, are effective, but opaque from an explainability perspective. Our approach first extracts the anomalous spikes from time series as events and then builds an RNN classifier with attention mechanisms to embed the irregularity and frequency of these events. A preliminary evaluation on real world storage environments shows that our approach can predict failures within a 3-day prediction window with comparable accuracy as traditional RNN-based classifiers. At the same time it can explain the predictions by returning the key anomalous events which led to those failure predictions.
@cite_29: Background Early classification of time series is beneficial for biomedical informatics problems such including, but not limited to, disease change detection. Early classification can be of tremendous help by identifying the onset of a disease before it has time to fully take hold. In addition, extracting patterns from the original time series helps domain experts to gain insights into the classification results. This problem has been studied recently using time series segments called shapelets. In this paper, we present a method, which we call Multivariate Shapelets Detection (MSD), that allows for early and patient-specific classification of multivariate time series. The method extracts time series patterns, called multivariate shapelets, from all dimensions of the time series that distinctly manifest the target class locally. The time series were classified by searching for the earliest closest patterns.
@cite_2: Time series classification has received great attention over the past decade with a wide range of methods focusing on predictive performance by exploiting various types of temporal features. Nonetheless, little emphasis has been placed on interpretability and explainability. In this paper, we formulate the novel problem of explainable time series tweaking, where, given a time series and an opaque classifier that provides a particular classification decision for the time series, we want to find the minimum number of changes to be performed to the given time series so that the classifier changes its decision to another class. We show that the problem is NP-hard, and focus on two instantiations of the problem, which we refer to as reversible and irreversible time series tweaking. The classifier under investigation is the random shapelet forest classifier. Moreover, we propose two algorithmic solutions for the two problems along with simple optimizations, as well as a baseline solution using the nearest neighbor classifier. An extensive experimental evaluation on a variety of real datasets demonstrates the usefulness and effectiveness of our problem formulation and solutions.
@cite_13: 
@cite_20: Early classification on time series data has been found highly useful in a few important applications, such as medical and health informatics, industry production management, safety and security management. While some classifiers have been proposed to achieve good earliness in classification, the interpretability of early classification remains largely an open problem. Without interpretable features, application domain experts such as medical doctors may be reluctant to adopt early classification. In this paper, we tackle the problem of extracting interpretable features on time series for early classification. Specifically, we advocate local shapelets as features, which are segments of time series remaining in the same space of the input data and thus are highly interpretable. We extract local shapelets distinctly manifesting a target class locally and early so that they are effective for early classification. Our experimental results on seven benchmark real data sets clearly show that the local shapelets extracted by our methods are highly interpretable and can achieve effective early classification.
@cite_17: Shapelets are discriminative patterns in time series, that best predict the target variable when their distances to the respective time series are used as features for a classifier. Since the shapelet is simply any time series of some length less than or equal to the length of the shortest time series in our data set, there is an enormous amount of possible shapelets present in the data. Initially, shapelets were found by extracting numerous candidates and evaluating them for their prediction quality. Then, [2] proposed a novel approach of learning time series shapelets called LTS. A new mathematical formalization of the task via a classification objective function was proposed and a tailored stochastic gradient learning was applied. It enabled learning near-to-optimal shapelets without the overhead of trying out lots of candidates. The Euclidean distance measure was used as distance metric in the proposed approach. As a limitation, it is not able to learn a single shapelet, that can be representative of different subsequences of time series, which are just warped along time axis. To consider these cases, we propose to use Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) as a distance measure in the framework of LTS. The proposed approach was evaluated on 11 real world data sets from the UCR repository and a synthetic data set created by ourselves. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the existing methods on these data sets.
The vast majority of explainable models for time series target their classification. @cite_13 propose grammar-based decision trees to classify heterogeneous time series. @cite_20 @cite_29 extract interpretable features from series, expressed as local shapelets, while @cite_17 learn such shapelets via stochastic gradient learning and use them for early classification. @cite_2 , the authors propose reversible and irreversible explainable tweaking, where given a time series and an opaque classifier, the objective is to find the minimum number of changes to the time series such that the classifier changes its decision.