Autoencoder-based time series clustering with energy applications

Time series clustering is a challenging task due to the specific nature of the data. Classical approaches do not perform well and need to be adapted either through a new distance measure or a data transformation. In this paper we investigate the combination of a convolutional autoencoder and a k-medoids algorithm to perfom time series clustering. The convolutional autoencoder allows to extract meaningful features and reduce the dimension of the data, leading to an improvement of the subsequent clustering. Using simulation and energy related data to validate the approach, experimental results show that the clustering is robust to outliers thus leading to finer clusters than with standard methods.