Classifying multivariate time series by learning sequence-level discriminative patterns

Time series classification algorithms designed to use local context do not work on landcover classification problems where the instances of the two classes may often exhibit similar feature values due to the large natural variations in other land covers across the year and unrelated phenomena that they undergo. In this paper, we propose to learn discriminative patterns from the entire length of the time series, and use them as predictive features to identify the class of interest. We propose a novel neural network algorithm to learn the key signature of the class of interest as a function of the feature values together with the discriminative pattern made from that signature through the entire time series in a joint framework. We demonstrate the utility of this technique on the landcover classification application of burned area mapping that is of considerable societal importance.