DTW-NN: A novel neural network for time series recognition using dynamic alignment between inputs and weights

This paper describes a novel model for time series recognition called a Dynamic Time Warping Neural Network (DTW-NN). DTW-NN is a feedforward neural network that exploits the elastic matching ability of DTW to dynamically align the inputs of a layer to the weights. This weight alignment replaces the standard dot product within a neuron with DTW. In this way, the DTW-NN is able to tackle difficulties with time series recognition such as temporal distortions and variable pattern length within a feedforward architecture. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DTW-NNs on four distinct datasets: online handwritten characters, accelerometer-based active daily life activities, spoken Arabic numeral Mel-Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients (MFCC), and one-dimensional centroid-radii sequences from leaf shapes. We show that the proposed method is an effective general approach to temporal pattern learning by achieving state-of-the-art results on these datasets.