Online inference for time-varying temporal dependency discovery from time series

Abstract

Large-scale time series data are prevalent across diverse application domains including system management, biomedical informatics, social networks, finance, etc. Temporal dependency discovery performs an essential part to identify the hidden interactions among the observed time series and helps to gain more insight into the behavior of the applications. However, the time-varying sparsity of the interactions among time series often poses a big challenge to temporal dependency discovery in practice. This paper formulates the temporal dependency problem with a novel Bayesian model allowing for both the sparsity and evolution of the hidden interactions among the observed time series. Taking advantage of the Bayesian modeling, an online inference method is proposed for time-varying temporal dependency discovery. Extensive empirical studies on both the synthetic and real application time series data are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed method.