Early classification of multivariate time series using a hybrid HMM/SVM model

Early classification of time series has been receiving a lot of attention as of late, particularly in the context of gene expression. In the biomédical realm, early classification can be of tremendous help, by identifying the onset of a disease before it has time to fully take hold, or determining that a treatment has done its job and can be discontinued. In this paper we present a state-of-the-art model, which we call the Early Classification Model (ECM), that allows for early, accurate, and patient-specific classification of multivariate time series. The model is comprised of an integration of the widely-used HMM and SVM models, which, while not a new technique per se, has not been used for early classification of multivariate time series classification until now. It attained very promising results on the datasets we tested it on: in our experiments based on a published dataset of response to drug therapy in Multiple Sclerosis patients, ECM used only an average of 40% of a time series and was able to outperform some of the baseline models, which needed the full time series for classification.