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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Feature Flocks : accurate pattern discovery in multivariate signals

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Thanks to the rise of wearable and connected devices, sensor-generated time series comprise a large and growing fraction of the world's data. Unfortunately, extracting value from this data can be challenging, since sensors can only report low-level signals (e.g., acceleration), not the high-level phenomena that are typically of interest (e.g., gestures). We introduce a technique to bridge this gap by automatically learning to identify real-world events in low-level data with no human labeling. By identifying "flocks" of features that repeat in the same temporal arrangement, we learn to recognize such diverse phenomena as human actions, power consumption patterns, and spoken words with up to 96% precision and recall. Our method is fast enough to run in real time and assumes only minimal knowledge of which variables are relevant or how long patterns are. Our evalation uses numerous publicly available datasets and over 1 million samples of sensor data in which we manually labeled ground truth.

Degree

thesis:*
Department dc:contributor.department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Grantor dc:publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Year dc:date.issued
2016

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Blalock, Davis W. (Davis Whitaker)
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • John V. Guttag.

Subjects

dc:subject × 1

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.
Language dc:language.iso
eng

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier.uri
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/105682
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/105682

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
MIT
Base URL
dspace.mit.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Blalock, Davis W. (Davis Whitaker). Feature Flocks : accurate pattern discovery in multivariate signals. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/105682