Agglomerative likelihood clustering

Abstract

We consider the problem of fast time-series data clustering. Building on previous work modeling, the correlation-based Hamiltonian of spin variables we present an updated fast non-expensive agglomerative likelihood clustering algorithm (ALC). The method replaces the optimized genetic algorithm based approach (f-SPC) with an agglomerative recursive merging framework inspired by previous work in econophysics and community detection. The method is tested on noisy synthetic correlated time-series datasets with a built-in cluster structure to demonstrate that the algorithm produces meaningful non-trivial results. We apply it to time-series datasets as large as 20 000 assets and we argue that ALC can reduce computation time costs and resource usage costs for large scale clustering for time-series applications while being serialized, and hence has no obvious parallelization requirement. The algorithm can be an effective choice for state-detection for online learning in a fast non-linear data environment, because the algorithm requires no prior information about the number of clusters.