The University of Southampton
University of Southampton Institutional Repository

Rock the KASBA: blazingly fast and accurate time series clustering

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
1384-5810
Holder, Christopher
fb345cc6-00fa-4256-80ba-a8d3cbdb768b
Bagnall, Anthony
d31e6506-2a00-4358-ba3f-baefd48d59d8
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).

Record type: Article

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
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.
Download (1MB)
Text
s10618-026-01189-9 - Version of Record
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.
Download (5MB)

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
ORCID for Anthony Bagnall: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0003-2360-8994

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 06 Mar 2025 17:39
Last modified: 16 Apr 2026 02:09

Export record

Altmetrics

Contributors

Author: Christopher Holder
Author: Anthony Bagnall ORCID iD

Download statistics

Downloads from ePrints over the past year. Other digital versions may also be available to download e.g. from the publisher's website.

View more statistics

Atom RSS 1.0 RSS 2.0

Contact ePrints Soton: eprints@soton.ac.uk

ePrints Soton supports OAI 2.0 with a base URL of http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/cgi/oai2

This repository has been built using EPrints software, developed at the University of Southampton, but available to everyone to use.

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue without changing your settings, we will assume that you are happy to receive cookies on the University of Southampton website.

×