Solved – Modeling time series with Gaussian Mixture Model

gaussian mixture distributiontime series

I'm reading Song and Wang's paper on incremental estimation of GMM for online data streaming clustering. I assumed that we could apply the same idea to model time series, as a time series is a data stream. That said, the paper explicitly mentions that all data points are independently and identically distributed right before its Theorem 1 (Estimator Updating Theorem). My question is, does this assumption of data points being i.i.d make GMM not suitable for modeling time series, because data points in a time series are usually not independent of each other? For instance, we often use autocorrelation to model time series?

Since people do use GMM to model time series for tasks like forecasting, clustering, and outlier detection, is it because either

  1. My understanding is incorrect as data points in a time series can be considered i.i.d?
  2. We can ignore the assumption of i.i.d as this assumption is not that important in practice?
  3. Embedded data points or segments into a different space, in which the embedded vectors can be treated as i.i.d? If so, is there any well accepted paper that discusses how to do such embedding?

Thanks,

Best Answer

You are right that for the different time points in a time series the i.i.d. assumption usually is inappropriate. However I believe that in all instances in which a Gaussian mixture is used for time series data in a sensible way, it is used so that there is no i.i.d. assumption for the points in the same time series. One possibility (as used in a paper linked in the comments to the original question) is that a full time series is represented by a single Gaussian vector allowing for a flexible covariance matrix structure, whereas different time series are assumed independent and the whole thing is used for clustering a data set of various time series. Another option is a Hidden Markov model, in which the cluster membership of points in time is governed by a Markov process allowing for dependence.

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