Multivariate time-series analysis and diffusion maps

Dimensionality reduction in multivariate time series has broad applications, ranging from financial-data analysis to biomedical research. However, high levels of ambient noise and various interferences result in nonstationary signals, which may lead to inefficient performance of conventional methods. In this paper, we propose a nonlinear dimensionality reduction framework using diffusion maps on a learned statistical manifold, which gives rise to the construction of a low-dimensional representation of the high-dimensional nonstationary time series. We show that diffusion maps, with affinity kernels based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the local statistics of samples, allow for efficient approximation of pairwise geodesic distances. To construct the statistical manifold, we estimate time-evolving parametric distributions by designing a family of Bayesian generative models. The proposed framework can be applied to problems in which the time-evolving distributions (of temporally localized data), rather than the samples themselves, are driven by a low-dimensional underlying process. We provide efficient parameter estimation and dimensionality reduction methodology and apply it to two applications: music analysis and epileptic-seizure prediction.