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Researcher profile

Themis Palpanas

Themis Palpanas contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
DatabasesMachine LearningArtificial IntelligenceLogic in Computer Science

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Published work

17 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Investigating simple target-covariate relationships for Chronos-2 and TabPFN-TS

Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance, often outperforming supervised models in zero-shot settings. Recent TSFM architectures, such as Chronos-2 and TabPFN-TS, aim to integrate covariates. In this paper, we design controlled experiments based on simple target-covariate relationships to assess this integration capability. Our results show that TabPFN-TS captures these relationships more effectively than Chronos-2, especially for short horizons, suggesting that the strong benchmark performance of Chronos-2 does not automatically translate into optimal modeling of simple covariate-target dependencies.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

dCAM: Dimension-wise Class Activation Map for Explaining Multivariate Data Series Classification

Data series classification is an important and challenging problem in data science. Explaining the classification decisions by finding the discriminant parts of the input that led the algorithm to some decisions is a real need in many applications. Convolutional neural networks perform well for the data series classification task; though, the explanations provided by this type of algorithm are poor for the specific case of multivariate data series. Addressing this important limitation is a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel method that solves this problem by highlighting both the temporal and dimensional discriminant information. Our contribution is two-fold: we first describe a convolutional architecture that enables the comparison of dimensions; then, we propose a method that returns dCAM, a Dimension-wise Class Activation Map specifically designed for multivariate time series (and CNN-based models). Experiments with several synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that dCAM is not only more accurate than previous approaches, but the only viable solution for discriminant feature discovery and classification explanation in multivariate time series. This paper has appeared in SIGMOD'22.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Generalized Supervised Meta-blocking (technical report)

Entity Resolution constitutes a core data integration task that relies on Blocking in order to tame its quadratic time complexity. Schema-agnostic blocking achieves very high recall, requires no domain knowledge and applies to data of any structuredness and schema heterogeneity. This comes at the cost of many irrelevant candidate pairs (i.e., comparisons), which can be significantly reduced through Meta-blocking techniques, i.e., techniques that leverage the co-occurrence patterns of entities inside the blocks: first, a weighting scheme assigns a score to every pair of candidate entities in proportion to the likelihood that they are matching and then, a pruning algorithm discards the pairs with the lowest scores. Supervised Meta-blocking goes beyond this approach by combining multiple scores per comparison into a feature vector that is fed to a binary classifier. By using probabilistic classifiers, Generalized Supervised Meta-blocking associates every pair of candidates with a score that can be used by any pruning algorithm. For higher effectiveness, new weighting schemes are examined as features. Through an extensive experimental analysis, we identify the best pruning algorithms, their optimal sets of features as well as the minimum possible size of the training set. The resulting approaches achieve excellent performance across several established benchmark datasets.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Series2Graph: Graph-based Subsequence Anomaly Detection for Time Series

Subsequence anomaly detection in long sequences is an important problem with applications in a wide range of domains. However, the approaches proposed so far in the literature have severe limitations: they either require prior domain knowledge used to design the anomaly discovery algorithms, or become cumbersome and expensive to use in situations with recurrent anomalies of the same type. In this work, we address these problems, and propose an unsupervised method suitable for domain agnostic subsequence anomaly detection. Our method, Series2Graph, is based on a graph representation of a novel low-dimensionality embedding of subsequences. Series2Graph needs neither labeled instances (like supervised techniques) nor anomaly-free data (like zero-positive learning techniques), and identifies anomalies of varying lengths. The experimental results, on the largest set of synthetic and real datasets used to date, demonstrate that the proposed approach correctly identifies single and recurrent anomalies without any prior knowledge of their characteristics, outperforming by a large margin several competing approaches in accuracy, while being up to orders of magnitude faster. This paper has appeared in VLDB 2020.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

A Survey of Blocking and Filtering Techniques for Entity Resolution

Efficiency techniques are an integral part of Entity Resolution, since its infancy. In this survey, we organized the bulk of works in the field into Blocking, Filtering and hybrid techniques, facilitating their understanding and use. We also provided an in-dept coverage of each category, further classifying the corresponding works into novel sub-categories. Lately, the efficiency techniques have received more attention, due to the rise of Big Data. This includes large volumes of semi-structured data, which pose challenges not only to the scalability of efficiency techniques, but also to their core assumptions: the requirement of Blocking for schema knowledge and of Filtering for high similarity thresholds. The former led to the introduction of schema-agnostic Blocking in conjunction with Block Processing techniques, while the latter led to more relaxed criteria of similarity. Our survey covers these new fields in detail, putting in context all relevant works.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Coconut Palm: Static and Streaming Data Series Exploration Now in your Palm

Many modern applications produce massive streams of data series and maintain them in indexes to be able to explore them through nearest neighbor search. Existing data series indexes, however, are expensive to operate as they issue many random I/Os to storage. To address this problem, we recently proposed Coconut, a new infrastructure that organizes data series based on a new sortable format. In this way, Coconut is able to leverage state-of-the-art indexing techniques that rely on sorting for the first time to build, maintain and query data series indexes using fast sequential I/Os. In this demonstration, we present Coconut Palm, a new exploration tool that allows to interactively combine different indexing techniques from within the Coconut infrastructure and to thereby seamlessly explore data series from across various scientific domains. We highlight the rich indexing design choices that Coconut opens up, and we present a new recommender tool that allows users to intelligently navigate them for both static and streaming data exploration scenarios.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Coconut: a scalable bottom-up approach for building data series indexes

Many modern applications produce massive amounts of data series that need to be analyzed, requiring efficient similarity search operations. However, the state-of-the-art data series indexes that are used for this purpose do not scale well for massive datasets in terms of performance, or storage costs. We pinpoint the problem to the fact that existing summarizations of data series used for indexing cannot be sorted while keeping similar data series close to each other in the sorted order. This leads to two design problems. First, traditional bulk-loading algorithms based on sorting cannot be used. Instead, index construction takes place through slow top-down insertions, which create a non-contiguous index that results in many random I/Os. Second, data series cannot be sorted and split across nodes evenly based on their median value; thus, most leaf nodes are in practice nearly empty. This further slows down query speed and amplifies storage costs. To address these problems, we present Coconut. The first innovation in Coconut is an inverted, sortable data series summarization that organizes data series based on a z-order curve, keeping similar series close to each other in the sorted order. As a result, Coconut is able to use bulk-loading techniques that rely on sorting to quickly build a contiguous index using large sequential disk I/Os. We then explore prefix-based and median-based splitting policies for bottom-up bulk-loading, showing that median-based splitting outperforms the state of the art, ensuring that all nodes are densely populated. Overall, we show analytically and empirically that Coconut dominates the state-of-the-art data series indexes in terms of construction speed, query speed, and storage costs.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Efficient Error-tolerant Search on Knowledge Graphs

Edge-labeled graphs are widely used to describe relationships between entities in a database. Given a query subgraph that represents an example of what the user is searching for, we study the problem of efficiently searching for similar subgraphs in a large data graph, where the similarity is defined in terms of the well-known graph edit distance. We call these queries "error-tolerant exemplar queries" since matches are allowed despite small variations in the graph structure and the labels. The problem in its general case is computationally intractable, but efficient solutions are reachable for labeled graphs under well-behaved distribution of the labels, commonly found in knowledge graphs. We propose two efficient exact algorithms, based on a filtering-and-verification framework, for finding subgraphs in a large data graph that are isomorphic to a query graph under some edit operations. Our filtering scheme, which uses the neighbourhood structure around a node and the presence or absence of paths, significantly reduces the number of candidates that are passed to the verification stage. Moreover, we analyze the costs of our algorithms and the conditions under which one algorithm is expected to outperform the other. Our analysis identifies some of the variables that affect the cost, including the number and the selectivity of query edge labels and the degree of nodes in the data graph, and characterizes their relationships. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of our filtering schemes and queries, the efficiency of our algorithms and the reliability of our cost models on real datasets.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

End-to-End Entity Resolution for Big Data: A Survey

One of the most important tasks for improving data quality and the reliability of data analytics results is Entity Resolution (ER). ER aims to identify different descriptions that refer to the same real-world entity, and remains a challenging problem. While previous works have studied specific aspects of ER (and mostly in traditional settings), in this survey, we provide for the first time an end-to-end view of modern ER workflows, and of the novel aspects of entity indexing and matching methods in order to cope with more than one of the Big Data characteristics simultaneously. We present the basic concepts, processing steps and execution strategies that have been proposed by different communities, i.e., database, semantic Web and machine learning, in order to cope with the loose structuredness, extreme diversity, high speed and large scale of entity descriptions used by real-world applications. Finally, we provide a synthetic discussion of the existing approaches, and conclude with a detailed presentation of open research directions.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Matrix Profile Goes MAD: Variable-Length Motif And Discord Discovery in Data Series

In the last fifteen years, data series motif and discord discovery have emerged as two useful and well-used primitives for data series mining, with applications to many domains, including robotics, entomology, seismology, medicine, and climatology. Nevertheless, the state-of-the-art motif and discord discovery tools still require the user to provide the relative length. Yet, in several cases, the choice of length is critical and unforgiving. Unfortunately, the obvious brute-force solution, which tests all lengths within a given range, is computationally untenable. In this work, we introduce a new framework, which provides an exact and scalable motif and discord discovery algorithm that efficiently finds all motifs and discords in a given range of lengths. We evaluate our approach with five diverse real datasets, and demonstrate that it is up to 20 times faster than the state-of-the-art. Our results also show that removing the unrealistic assumption that the user knows the correct length, can often produce more intuitive and actionable results, which could have otherwise been missed. (Paper published in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Journal - 2020)

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

MESSI: In-Memory Data Series Indexing

Data series similarity search is a core operation for several data series analysis applications across many different domains. However, the state-of-the-art techniques fail to deliver the time performance required for interactive exploration, or analysis of large data series collections. In this work, we propose MESSI, the first data series index designed for in-memory operation on modern hardware. Our index takes advantage of the modern hardware parallelization opportunities (i.e., SIMD instructions, multi-core and multi-socket architectures), in order to accelerate both index construction and similarity search processing times. Moreover, it benefits from a careful design in the setup and coordination of the parallel workers and data structures, so that it maximizes its performance for in-memory operations. Our experiments with synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that overall MESSI is up to 4x faster at index construction, and up to 11x faster at query answering than the state-of-the-art parallel approach. MESSI is the first to answer exact similarity search queries on 100GB datasets in _50msec (30-75msec across diverse datasets), which enables real-time, interactive data exploration on very large data series collections.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

ParIS+: Data Series Indexing on Multi-Core Architectures

Data series similarity search is a core operation for several data series analysis applications across many different domains. Nevertheless, even state-of-the-art techniques cannot provide the time performance required for large data series collections. We propose ParIS and ParIS+, the first disk-based data series indices carefully designed to inherently take advantage of multi-core architectures, in order to accelerate similarity search processing times. Our experiments demonstrate that ParIS+ completely removes the CPU latency during index construction for disk-resident data, and for exact query answering is up to 1 order of magnitude faster than the current state of the art index scan method, and up to 3 orders of magnitude faster than the optimized serial scan method. ParIS+ (which is an evolution of the ADS+ index) owes its efficiency to the effective use of multi-core and multi-socket architectures, in order to distribute and execute in parallel both index construction and query answering, and to the exploitation of the Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) capabilities of modern CPUs, in order to further parallelize the execution of instructions inside each core.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Return of the Lernaean Hydra: Experimental Evaluation of Data Series Approximate Similarity Search

Data series are a special type of multidimensional data present in numerous domains, where similarity search is a key operation that has been extensively studied in the data series literature. In parallel, the multidimensional community has studied approximate similarity search techniques. We propose a taxonomy of similarity search techniques that reconciles the terminology used in these two domains, we describe modifications to data series indexing techniques enabling them to answer approximate similarity queries with quality guarantees, and we conduct a thorough experimental evaluation to compare approximate similarity search techniques under a unified framework, on synthetic and real datasets in memory and on disk. Although data series differ from generic multidimensional vectors (series usually exhibit correlation between neighboring values), our results show that data series techniques answer approximate %similarity queries with strong guarantees and an excellent empirical performance, on data series and vectors alike. These techniques outperform the state-of-the-art approximate techniques for vectors when operating on disk, and remain competitive in memory.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Scalable Data Series Subsequence Matching with ULISSE

Data series similarity search is an important operation and at the core of several analysis tasks and applications related to data series collections. Despite the fact that data series indexes enable fast similarity search, all existing indexes can only answer queries of a single length (fixed at index construction time), which is a severe limitation. In this work, we propose ULISSE, the first data series index structure designed for answering similarity search queries of variable length (within some range). Our contribution is two-fold. First, we introduce a novel representation technique, which effectively and succinctly summarizes multiple sequences of different length. Based on the proposed index, we describe efficient algorithms for approximate and exact similarity search, combining disk based index visits and in-memory sequential scans. Our approach supports non Z-normalized and Z-normalized sequences, and can be used with no changes with both Euclidean Distance and Dynamic Time Warping, for answering both k-NN and epsilon-range queries. We experimentally evaluate our approach using several synthetic and real datasets. The results show that ULISSE is several times, and up to orders of magnitude more efficient in terms of both space and time cost, when compared to competing approaches. (Paper published in VLDBJ 2020)

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

SentiQ: A Probabilistic Logic Approach to Enhance Sentiment Analysis Tool Quality

The opinion expressed in various Web sites and social-media is an essential contributor to the decision making process of several organizations. Existing sentiment analysis tools aim to extract the polarity (i.e., positive, negative, neutral) from these opinionated contents. Despite the advance of the research in the field, sentiment analysis tools give \textit{inconsistent} polarities, which is harmful to business decisions. In this paper, we propose SentiQ, an unsupervised Markov logic Network-based approach that injects the semantic dimension in the tools through rules. It allows to detect and solve inconsistencies and then improves the overall accuracy of the tools. Preliminary experimental results demonstrate the usefulness of SentiQ.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

The Lernaean Hydra of Data Series Similarity Search: An Experimental Evaluation of the State of the Art

Increasingly large data series collections are becoming commonplace across many different domains and applications. A key operation in the analysis of data series collections is similarity search, which has attracted lots of attention and effort over the past two decades. Even though several relevant approaches have been proposed in the literature, none of the existing studies provides a detailed evaluation against the available alternatives. The lack of comparative results is further exacerbated by the non-standard use of terminology, which has led to confusion and misconceptions. In this paper, we provide definitions for the different flavors of similarity search that have been studied in the past, and present the first systematic experimental evaluation of the efficiency of data series similarity search techniques. Based on the experimental results, we describe the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and give recommendations for the best approach to use under typical use cases. Finally, by identifying the shortcomings of each method, our findings lay the ground for solid further developments in the field.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

VALMOD: A Suite for Easy and Exact Detection of Variable Length Motifs in Data Series

Data series motif discovery represents one of the most useful primitives for data series mining, with applications to many domains, such as robotics, entomology, seismology, medicine, and climatology, and others. The state-of-the-art motif discovery tools still require the user to provide the motif length. Yet, in several cases, the choice of motif length is critical for their detection. Unfortunately, the obvious brute-force solution, which tests all lengths within a given range, is computationally untenable, and does not provide any support for ranking motifs at different resolutions (i.e., lengths). We demonstrate VALMOD, our scalable motif discovery algorithm that efficiently finds all motifs in a given range of lengths, and outputs a length-invariant ranking of motifs. Furthermore, we support the analysis process by means of a newly proposed meta-data structure that helps the user to select the most promising pattern length. This demo aims at illustrating in detail the steps of the proposed approach, showcasing how our algorithm and corresponding graphical insights enable users to efficiently identify the correct motifs. (Paper published in ACM Sigmod Conference 2018.)

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access