SAX (Symbolic Aggregate approXimation)
From the webpage:
SAX is the first symbolic representation for time series that allows for dimensionality reduction and indexing with a lower-bounding distance measure. In classic data mining tasks such as clustering, classification, index, etc., SAX is as good as well-known representations such as Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT), while requiring less storage space. In addition, the representation allows researchers to avail of the wealth of data structures and algorithms in bioinformatics or text mining, and also provides solutions to many challenges associated with current data mining tasks. One example is motif discovery, a problem which we defined for time series data. There is great potential for extending and applying the discrete representation on a wide class of data mining tasks.
From a testimonial on the webpage:
the performance SAX enables is amazing, and I think a real breakthrough. As an example, we can find similarity searches using edit distance over 10,000 time series in 50 milliseconds. Ray Cromwell, Timepedia.org
Don’t usually see “testimonials” on an academic website but they appear to be merited in this case.
Serious similarity software. Take the time to look.
BTW, you may also be interested in a SAX time series/Shape tutorial. (120 slides about what makes SAX special.)