Rock the KASBA: blazingly fast and accurate time series clustering
Rock the KASBA: blazingly fast and accurate time series clustering
Time series data has become increasingly prevalent across numerous domains, driving a growing demand for time series machine learning techniques. Among these, time series clustering (TSCL) stands out as one of the most popular machine learning tasks. TSCL serves as a powerful exploratory analysis tool and is also employed as a preprocessing step or subroutine for various tasks, including anomaly detection, segmentation, and classification. The most popular TSCL algorithms are either fast (in terms of runtime) but perform poorly on benchmark problems, or perform well on benchmarks but scale poorly. We present a new TSCL algorithm, the k-means (K) Accelerated (A) Stochastic subgradient (S) Barycentre (B) Average (A) (KASBA) clustering algorithm. KASBA is a k-means clustering algorithm that uses the Move-Split-Merge (MSM) elastic distance at all stages of clustering, applies a randomised stochastic subgradient descent to find barycentre centroids, links each stage of clustering to accelerate convergence and exploits the metric property of MSM distance to avoid a large proportion of distance calculations. It is a versatile and scalable clusterer designed for real-world TSCL applications. It allows practitioners to balance runtime and clustering performance when similarity is best measured by an elastic distance. We demonstrate through extensive experimentation that KASBA matches the current shape based state of the art clusterers and offers orders of magnitude improvement in runtime over the most performant elastic distance based k-means alternatives.
Barycenter, Barycentre average, Clustering, DBA, Elastic barycentre averaging, Elastic distances, k-means, k-means Accelerated stochastic subgradient barycentre average, k-means++, KASBA, MBA, Move-split-merge, Stochastic subgradient, Time series clustering
Holder, Christopher
fb345cc6-00fa-4256-80ba-a8d3cbdb768b
Bagnall, Anthony
d31e6506-2a00-4358-ba3f-baefd48d59d8
25 February 2026
Holder, Christopher
fb345cc6-00fa-4256-80ba-a8d3cbdb768b
Bagnall, Anthony
d31e6506-2a00-4358-ba3f-baefd48d59d8
Holder, Christopher and Bagnall, Anthony
(2026)
Rock the KASBA: blazingly fast and accurate time series clustering.
Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 40 (2), [21].
(doi:10.48550/arXiv.2411.17838).
Abstract
Time series data has become increasingly prevalent across numerous domains, driving a growing demand for time series machine learning techniques. Among these, time series clustering (TSCL) stands out as one of the most popular machine learning tasks. TSCL serves as a powerful exploratory analysis tool and is also employed as a preprocessing step or subroutine for various tasks, including anomaly detection, segmentation, and classification. The most popular TSCL algorithms are either fast (in terms of runtime) but perform poorly on benchmark problems, or perform well on benchmarks but scale poorly. We present a new TSCL algorithm, the k-means (K) Accelerated (A) Stochastic subgradient (S) Barycentre (B) Average (A) (KASBA) clustering algorithm. KASBA is a k-means clustering algorithm that uses the Move-Split-Merge (MSM) elastic distance at all stages of clustering, applies a randomised stochastic subgradient descent to find barycentre centroids, links each stage of clustering to accelerate convergence and exploits the metric property of MSM distance to avoid a large proportion of distance calculations. It is a versatile and scalable clusterer designed for real-world TSCL applications. It allows practitioners to balance runtime and clustering performance when similarity is best measured by an elastic distance. We demonstrate through extensive experimentation that KASBA matches the current shape based state of the art clusterers and offers orders of magnitude improvement in runtime over the most performant elastic distance based k-means alternatives.
Text
2411.17838v1
- Author's Original
Text
s10618-026-01189-9
- Version of Record
More information
Accepted/In Press date: 19 January 2026
e-pub ahead of print date: 25 February 2026
Published date: 25 February 2026
Keywords:
Barycenter, Barycentre average, Clustering, DBA, Elastic barycentre averaging, Elastic distances, k-means, k-means Accelerated stochastic subgradient barycentre average, k-means++, KASBA, MBA, Move-split-merge, Stochastic subgradient, Time series clustering
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 498991
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/498991
ISSN: 1384-5810
PURE UUID: 45bc30c4-ae95-497c-9e6b-b859390200f5
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Date deposited: 06 Mar 2025 17:39
Last modified: 16 Apr 2026 02:09
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Contributors
Author:
Christopher Holder
Author:
Anthony Bagnall
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