A Fuzzy Generalisation of the Hamming Distance for Temporal Sequences

Abstract

The study of temporal sequences is a main topic in different domains, especially for human mobility mining. This article defines the Fuzzy Temporal Hamming (FTH) distance between temporal sequences. This new measure generalises the Hamming distance and improves it by introducing a fuzzy time-window. This fuzzy approach tolerates temporal distortions as shifting and permutations. Moreover, the time computation of FTH is competitive with other Optimal Matching methods used for temporal sequences comparison. To validate this approach, we cluster data from a real Time-Use Survey and we compare the results obtained with other methods.