The Swiss army knife of time series data mining: ten useful things you can do with the matrix profile and ten lines of code

The recently introduced data structure, the Matrix Profile, annotates a time series by recording the location of and distance to the nearest neighbor of every subsequence. This information trivially provides answers to queries for both time series motifs and time series discords, perhaps two of the most frequently used primitives in time series data mining. One attractive feature of the Matrix Profile is that it completely divorces the high-level details of the analytics performed, from the computational “heavy lifting.” The Matrix Profile can be computed using the appropriate computational paradigm for the task at hand: CPU, GPU, FPGA, distributed computing, anytime computation, incremental computation, and so forth. However, all the details of such computation can be hidden from the analyst who only needs to think about her analytical need. In this work, we expand on this philosophy and ask the following question: If we assume that we get the Matrix Profile for free, what interesting analytics can we do, writing at most ten lines of code? As we will show, the answer is surprisingly large and diverse. Our aim here is not to establish or compete with state-of-the-art results, but merely to show that we can both reproduce the results of many existing algorithms and find novel regularities in time series data collections with very little effort.