Second-order Confidence Network for Early Classification of Time Series

Time series data are ubiquitous in a variety of disciplines. Early classification of time series, which aims to predict the class label of a time series as early and accurately as possible, is a significant but challenging task in many time-sensitive applications. Existing approaches mainly utilize heuristic stopping rules to capture stopping signals from the prediction results of time series classifiers. However, heuristic stopping rules can only capture obvious stopping signals, which makes these approaches give either correct but late predictions or early but incorrect predictions. To tackle the problem, we propose a novel second-order confidence network for early classification of time series, which can automatically learn to capture implicit stopping signals in early time series in a unified framework. The proposed model leverages deep neural models to capture temporal patterns and outputs second-order confidence to reflect the implicit stopping signals. Specifically, our model exploits the data not only from a time step but also from the probability sequence to capture stopping signals. By combining stopping signals from the classifier output and the second-order confidence, we design a more robust trigger to decide whether or not to request more observations from future time steps. Experimental results show that our approach can achieve superior results in early classification compared to state-of-the-art approaches.