• Journal of KIISE:Databases
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.381-396
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• 2003

Subsequence matching is an operation that finds subsequences whose changing patterns are similar to a given query sequence from time-series databases. This paper points out the performance bottleneck in subsequence matching, and then proposes an effective method that improves the performance of entire subsequence matching significantly by resolving the performance bottleneck. First, we analyze the disk access and CPU processing times required during the index searching and post processing steps through preliminary experiments. Based on their results, we show that the post processing step is the main performance bottleneck in subsequence matching, and them claim that its optimization is a crucial issue overlooked in previous approaches. In order to resolve the performance bottleneck, we propose a simple but quite effective method that processes the post processing step in the optimal way. By rearranging the order of candidate subsequences to be compared with a query sequence, our method completely eliminates the redundancy of disk accesses and CPU processing occurred in the post processing step. We formally prove that our method is optimal and also does not incur any false dismissal. We show the effectiveness of our method by extensive experiments. The results show that our method achieves significant speed-up in the post processing step 3.91 to 9.42 times when using a data set of real-world stock sequences and 4.97 to 5.61 times when using data sets of a large volume of synthetic sequences. Also, the results show that our method reduces the weight of the post processing step in entire subsequence matching from about 90% to less than 70%. This implies that our method successfully resolves th performance bottleneck in subsequence matching. As a result, our method provides excellent performance in entire subsequence matching. The experimental results reveal that it is 3.05 to 5.60 times faster when using a data set of real-world stock sequences and 3.68 to 4.21 times faster when using data sets of a large volume of synthetic sequences compared with the previous one.