Clustering multivariate time series using energy distance

A novel methodology is proposed for clustering multivariate time series data using energy distance defined in Székely and Rizzo (2013). Specifically, a dissimilarity matrix is formed using the energy distance statistic to measure the separation between the finite-dimensional distributions for the component time series. Once the pairwise dissimilarity matrix is calculated, a hierarchical clustering method is then applied to obtain the dendrogram. This procedure is completely nonparametric as the dissimilarities between stationary distributions are directly calculated without making any model assumptions. In order to justify this procedure, asymptotic properties of the energy distance estimates are derived for general stationary and ergodic time series. The method is illustrated in a simulation study for various component time series that are either linear or nonlinear. Finally, the methodology is applied to two examples; one involves the GDP of selected countries and the other is the population size of various states in the U.S.A. in the years 1900–1999.