VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi
dblp:189/1588 · also Soukaïna Filali Boubrahimi
· DBLP profile ↗
37ranked-venue papers in the field
7as first author
24since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0001-5693-6383ORCID · verified
Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several
Big Data, Cloud & Distributed Data Systems · 21 (4 first)Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery · 9 (1 first)Information Retrieval & Web Search · 4 (1 first)Database Systems & Data Management · 2 (1 first)Other / Interdisciplinary · 1
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Improving Causal Feasibility in Counterfactual Explanations for Multivariate Time Series Classification
Omar Bahri, Pouya Hosseinzadeh, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Shah Muhammad Hamdi |
IEEE Big Data | 4 |
| 2025 | Global Cross-Time Attention Fusion for Enhanced Solar Flare Prediction from Multivariate Time Series
Onur Vural, Shah Muhammad Hamdi, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi |
IEEE Big Data | 3 |
| 2025 | Pruning Strategies for Backdoor Defense in LLMsabstractBackdoor attacks are a significant threat to the performance and integrity of pre-trained language models. Although such models are routinely fine-tuned for downstream NLP tasks, recent work shows they remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks that survive vanilla fine-tuning. These attacks are difficult to defend because end users typically lack knowledge of the attack triggers. Such attacks consist of stealthy malicious triggers introduced through subtle syntactic or stylistic manipulations, which can bypass traditional detection and remain in the model, making post-hoc purification essential. In this study, we explore whether attention-head pruning can mitigate these threats without any knowledge of the trigger or access to a clean reference model. To this end, we design and implement six pruning-based strategies: (i) gradient-based pruning, (ii) layer-wise variance pruning, (iii) gradient-based pruning with structured L1/L2 sparsification, (iv) randomized ensemble pruning, (v) reinforcement-learning-guided pruning, and (vi) Bayesian uncertainty pruning. Each method iteratively removes the least informative heads while monitoring validation accuracy to avoid over-pruning. Experimental evaluation shows that gradient-based pruning performs best while defending the syntactic triggers, whereas reinforcement learning and Bayesian pruning better withstand stylistic attacks. Santosh Chapagain, Shah Muhammad Hamdi, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi |
CIKM | 3 |
| 2025 | CACTUS: Cross-Aligned Counterfactual Explanation for Time Series ClassificationabstractCounterfactual explanations are essential for inter-preting predictions made by time series classifiers, yet existing methods often disrupt inherent temporal dependencies, resulting in unrealistic explanations. We propose CACTUS (Cross-Aligned Counterfactuals for Time Series Classification), a novel model-agnostic framework designed to generate interpretable explanations for black-box models. CACTUS leverages Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) Barycenter Averaging and introduces a cross-correlation loss to enforce temporal consistency and alignment. We introduce two variants of CACTUS: one that emphasizes minimal perturbations while maintaining classification validity, and another that ensures gradual, realistic modifications in the time series. Comprehensive experiments on diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate that CACTUS outperforms state-of-the-art optimization-based methods by generating more reliable and interpretable counterfactual explanations, establishing it as a robust tool for post-hoc time series models analysis and explanations. Pouya Hosseinzadeh, Omar Bahri, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Shah Muhammad Hamdi |
DSAA | 4 |
| 2025 | Diverse and Plausible Counterfactual Explanations for Time Series via Latent Space OptimizationabstractUnderstanding the predictions of time series classifiers is essential in high-stakes domains such as health-care, finance, and security. Counterfactual explanations, which identify minimal perturbations to input sequences that alter model predictions, provide intuitive and actionable insights. However, existing methods often struggle to generate realistic or diverse counterfactuals, especially for sequential data with strong temporal dependencies. In this work, we propose DiverseLCF, a post-hoc framework for generating diverse and plausible counterfactual explanations for time series classifiers. By optimizing in the latent space of a pretrained variational autoencoder (VAE), DiverseLCF ensures that generated counterfactuals remain temporally coherent and aligned with the data manifold. We formulate the generation process as a multi-objective optimization problem that balances validity, proximity, and diversity. Extensive experiments show that DiverseLCF consistently generates valid, plausible, and diverse coun-terfactuals with minimal proximity trade-offs, providing a robust and generalizable tool for interpreting time series models. Omar Bahri, Pouya Hosseinzadeh, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Shah Muhammad Hamdi |
DSAA | 4 |
| 2025 | TIMED: Adversarial and Autoregressive Refinement of Diffusion-Based Time Series GenerationabstractGenerating high-quality synthetic time series is a fundamental yet challenging task across domains such as forecasting and anomaly detection, where real data can be scarce, noisy, or costly to collect. Unlike static data generation, synthesizing time series requires modeling both the marginal distribution of observations and the conditional temporal dependencies that govern sequential dynamics. We propose TIMED, a unified generative framework that integrates a denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) to capture global structure via a forward-reverse diffusion process, a supervisor network trained with teacher forcing to learn autoregressive dependencies through next-step prediction, and a Wasserstein critic that provides adversarial feedback to ensure temporal smoothness and fidelity. To further align the real and synthetic distributions in feature space, TIMED incorporates a Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) loss, promoting both diversity and sample quality. All components are built using masked attention architectures optimized for sequence modeling and are trained jointly to effectively capture both unconditional and conditional aspects of time series data. Experimental results across diverse multivariate time series benchmarks demonstrate that TIMED generates more realistic and temporally coherent sequences than state-of-the-art generative models. MohammadReza EskandariNasab, Shah Muhammad Hamdi, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi |
ICDM | 3 |
| 2025 | AVATAR: Adversarial Autoencoders with Autoregressive Refinement for Time Series GenerationabstractData augmentation can significantly enhance the performance of machine learning tasks by addressing data scarcity and improving generalization. However, generating time series data presents unique challenges. A model must not only learn a probability distribution that reflects the real data distribution but also capture the conditional distribution at each time step to preserve the inherent temporal dependencies. To address these challenges, we introduce AVATAR, a framework that combines Adversarial Autoencoders (AAE) with Autoregressive Learning to achieve both objectives. Specifically, our technique integrates the autoencoder with a supervisor and introduces a novel supervised loss to assist the decoder in learning the temporal dynamics of time series data. Additionally, we propose another innovative loss function, termed distribution loss, to guide the encoder in more efficiently aligning the aggregated posterior of the autoencoder’s latent representation with a prior Gaussian distribution. Furthermore, our framework employs a joint training mechanism to simultaneously train all networks using a combined loss, thereby fulfilling the dual objectives of time series generation. We evaluate our technique across a variety of time series datasets with diverse characteristics. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements in both the quality and practical utility of the generated data, as assessed by various qualitative and quantitative metrics. MohammadReza EskandariNasab, Shah Muhammad Hamdi, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi |
SDM | 3 |
| 2024 | SeriesGAN: Time Series Generation via Adversarial and Autoregressive LearningabstractCurrent Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based approaches for time series generation face challenges such as suboptimal convergence, information loss in embedding spaces, and instability. To overcome these challenges, we introduce an advanced framework that integrates the advantages of an autoencoder-generated embedding space with the adversarial training dynamics of GANs. This method employs two discriminators: one to specifically guide the generator and another to refine both the autoencoder’s and generator’s output. Additionally, our framework incorporates a novel autoencoder-based loss function and supervision from a teacher-forcing supervisor network, which captures the stepwise conditional distributions of the data. The generator operates within the latent space, while the two discriminators work on latent and feature spaces separately, providing crucial feedback to both the generator and the autoencoder. By leveraging this dual-discriminator approach, we minimize information loss in the embedding space. Through joint training, our framework excels at generating high-fidelity time series data, consistently outperforming existing state-of-the-art benchmarks both qualitatively and quantitatively across a range of real and synthetic multivariate time series datasets. MohammadReza EskandariNasab, Shah Muhammad Hamdi, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi |
IEEE Big Data | 3 |
| 2024 | ACTS: Adaptive Counterfactual Explanations for Time Series Data Using BarycentersabstractEXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods are essential for understanding complex machine learning models. This paper presents Adaptive Counterfactual Explanations for Time Series (ACTS), a model-agnostic algorithm that improves the interpretability, sparsity, and contiguity of counterfactuals. ACTS leverages Barycenter Averaging (DBA) with Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and a regularized loss function combining prediction, DBA, L1 regularization, sparsity, and smoothness terms. Empirical results on real-world datasets show ACTS generates high-quality explanations with fewer outliers and better interpretability than current methods, advancing XAI in time series analysis. Pouya Hosseinzadeh, Omar Bahri, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Shah Muhammad Hamdi |
IEEE Big Data | 4 |
| 2024 | Reliable Time Series Counterfactual Explanations Guided by ShapeDBAabstractArtificial intelligence (AI) and algorithmic decision-making are profoundly shaping various aspects of society, with applications in healthcare, business, education, etc. As these systems become more integral to high-stakes decisions, concerns about their transparency and interpretability are growing. To address these concerns, explainable AI (XAI) methods have been developed, with counterfactual explanations emerging as a powerful tool. Counterfactuals help users understand AI decisions by demonstrating how small changes in input could alter the outcome, providing a clear and intuitive way to interpret AI behavior. Despite their potential, generating valid, interpretable, and efficient counterfactual explanations is particularly challenging in time series domains, where data points are interdependent. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to counterfactual explanations guided by ShapeDTW Barycenter Averaging (ShapeDBA). By integrating ShapeDBA into the counterfactual generation process, we ensure that the produced explanations are not only valid and interpretable but also efficient to generate. Our approach provides counterfactuals that align closely with human intuition while maintaining the computational efficiency required for practical deployment. This work represents a significant step forward in the development of interpretable AI systems, particularly in the complex domain of time series analysis. Pouya Hosseinzadeh, Omar Bahri, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Shah Muhammad Hamdi |
IEEE Big Data | 4 |
| 2024 | EXCON: Extreme Instance-based Contrastive Representation Learning of Severely Imbalanced Multivariate Time Series for Solar Flare PredictionabstractIn heliophysics research, predicting solar flares is crucial due to their potential to substantially impact both space-based systems and Earth’s infrastructure. Magnetic field data from solar active regions, recorded by solar imaging observatories, are transformed into multivariate time series to enable solar flare prediction using temporal window-based analysis. In the realm of multivariate time series-driven solar flare prediction, addressing severe class imbalance with effective strategies for multivariate time series representation learning is key to developing robust predictive models. Traditional methods often struggle with overfitting to the majority class in prediction tasks where major solar flares are infrequent. This work presents EX-CON, a contrastive representation learning framework designed to enhance classification performance amidst such imbalances. EXCON operates through four stages: (1) obtaining core features from multivariate time series data; (2) selecting distinctive contrastive representations for each class to maximize inter-class separation; (3) training a temporal feature embedding module with a custom extreme reconstruction loss to minimize intra-class variation; and (4) applying a classifier to the learned embeddings for robust classification. The proposed method leverages contrastive learning principles to map similar instances closer in the feature space while distancing dissimilar ones, a strategy not extensively explored in solar flare prediction tasks. This approach not only addresses class imbalance but also offers a versatile solution applicable to both univariate and multivariate time series across binary and multiclass classification problems. Experimental results, including evaluations on the benchmark solar flare dataset and multiple time series archive datasets with binary and multiclass labels, demonstrate EXCON’s efficacy in enhancing classification performance and reducing overfitting. Onur Vural, Shah Muhammad Hamdi, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi |
IEEE Big Data | 3 |
| 2024 | Discord-based counterfactual explanations for time series classificationabstractAbstract The opacity inherent in machine learning models presents a significant hindrance to their widespread incorporation into decision-making processes. To address this challenge and foster trust among stakeholders while ensuring decision fairness, the data mining community has been actively advancing the explainable artificial intelligence paradigm. This paper contributes to the evolving field by focusing on counterfactual generation for time series classification models, a domain where research is relatively scarce. We develop, a post-hoc, model agnostic counterfactual explanation algorithm that leverages the Matrix Profile to map time series discords to their nearest neighbors in a target sequence and use this mapping to generate new counterfactual instances. To our knowledge, this is the first effort towards the use of time series discords for counterfactual explanations. We evaluate our algorithm on the University of California Riverside and University of East Anglia archives and compare it to three state-of-the-art univariate and multivariate methods. Omar Bahri, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Shah Muhammad Hamdi |
Data Min. Knowl. Discov. | 3 |
| 2023 | Multiloss-Based Optimization for Time Series Data AugmentationabstractData augmentation plays an important part in the current success of machine learning and deep learning models. In particular, state-of-the-art architectures in the image recognition field include data augmentation modules as an integral part. However, there is still room for progress in the time series domain. In this work, we introduce OptimAug, a novel method for time series data augmentation. We deviate from the current state-of-the-art comprised of random transformations, pattern mixing, generative models, and decomposition methods, to develop the first multiloss-based optimization method. We evaluate our method with its two variants on datasets from the University of California Riverside (UCR) archive and compare it to multiple baseline algorithms from the literature. Omar Bahri, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Shah Muhammad Hamdi |
IEEE Big Data | 3 |
| 2023 | Predicting Linguistically Sophisticated Social Determinants of Health Disparities with Neural Networks: The Case of LGBTQ+ Minority StressabstractLGBTQ+ minority stress is a pervasive form of anti-LGBTQ+ adverse events and psychological strain that drives health inequities among LGBTQ+ people. Minority stress is also linguistically sophisticated (e.g., composed of cultural idioms, psycholinguistic permutations, and lexical density). Because minority stress is a linguistically sophisticated social determinant of health disparities, it is challenging to detect using natural language processing (NLP). Using 5,789 human-annotated Reddit posts from the LGBTQ+ Minority Stress on Social Media (MiSSoM+) Dataset, we investigated and compared the performance of four neural networks and two traditional machine learning architectures in modeling minority stress at both the factor (i.e., separate components of minority stress) and composite level. A novel hybrid model combining Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers and convolutional neural network (BERT-CNN) improved the prediction of composite minority stress (F1 = 0.84). Our experiments on separate factors of minority stress are the first to demonstrate that hybrid neural network models can detect semantically complex expressions of prejudiced events (F1 = 0.87), expected rejection (F1 = 0.92), internalized stigma (F1 = 0.91), identity concealment (F1 = 0.92), and minority coping (F1 = 0.84). We also substantially improved the prediction of gender dysphoria (F1 = 0.94)—a conceptually new candidate component of minority stress. Big data analytics may not be a panacea for the problem of minority stress, but our work joins a growing literature base to show that deep learning models are remarkable in detecting linguistically sophisticated social determinants of health disparities in big data, thus providing evidence in support of the potential benefit from the innovative use of such technology in eliminating group-specific health inequities. Cory J. Cascalheira, Santosh Chapagain, Ryan E. Flinn, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Dannie Klooster, Alejandra Gonzalez, Emily M. Lund, Danica Laprade, Jillian R. Scheer, Shah Muhammad Hamdi |
IEEE Big Data | 5 |
| 2023 | CELS: Counterfactual Explanations for Time Series Data via Learned Saliency MapsabstractAs the demand for interpretable machine learning approaches increases, there is an increasing need for human involvement to provide diverse explanations for model decisions. This is crucial for enhancing trust and transparency in AI-based systems, leading to the emergence of the Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) field. In this paper, we design a novel counterfactual explanation model, CELS, which learns a saliency map for the interest of an instance and generates a counterfactual explanation guided by the learned saliency map. CELS adopts a gradient-based approach composed of three interdependent modules that combine to generate sparse counterfactual explanations that are easily understood by end users. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to guide the perturbation to generate a counterfactual explanation via a learned saliency map. To validate our model, we conducted experiments using five popular real-world time-series datasets obtained from the UCR repository. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our model in achieving higher sparsity, proximity, and interpretability of counterfactual explanations when compared to other state-of-the-art baselines. Omar Bahri, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Shah Muhammad Hamdi |
IEEE Big Data | 3 |
| 2023 | Motif Alignment for Time Series Data Augmentation
Omar Bahri, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Shah Muhammad Hamdi |
DaWaK | 3 |
| 2023 | Attention-Based Counterfactual Explanation for Multivariate Time Series
Omar Bahri, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Shah Muhammad Hamdi |
DaWaK | 3 |
| 2022 | Feature Selection from Multivariate Time Series Data: A Case Study of Solar Flare PredictionabstractSolar physicists frequently use solar magnetic field parameters for analyzing and predicting solar events. Temporal observation of magnetic field parameters, i.e., multivariate time series (MVTS) representation facilitates finding relationships of magnetic field states to the occurrence of extreme solar events (e.g., solar flares). Feature selection of MVTS-represented solar magnetic field parameters (features) can select the most relevant parameters that give high prediction accuracy. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based feature selection method, more specifically, an LSTM-based incremental feature selection method, as an end-to-end solution for feature selection in MVTS data. We performed LSTM-based feature selection for multivariate time series data in two steps. Firstly, each MVTS feature is evaluated individually by an LSTM-based univariate sequence classifier, and secondly, the top-performing features are combined to produce input for a downstream LSTM-based multivariate sequence classifier. We compared the proposed MVTS feature selection method with three other baseline feature selection methods on an MVTS-based solar flare prediction dataset and demonstrated that our method selects more discriminatory features compared to other methods. Khaznah Alshammari, Shah Muhammad Hamdi, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi |
IEEE Big Data | 3 |
| 2022 | Shapelet-based Temporal Association Rule Mining for Multivariate Time Series ClassificationabstractThe rapid upsurge of numerical sources of information and the growth of storage capacities in recent years has resulted in the collection of massive time series datasets. Inspired by association rule mining and other rule discovery algorithms, several approaches have been proposed in the literature to discover temporal association rules from time series data. These methods place interpretability at the top of their priorities and aim to provide domain experts with relevant and qualitative rules. In this paper, we aim to fill the gap between temporal association rule mining and time series classification t asks to increase the interpretability of current classification methods. We propose rule transform (RT), a novel algorithm for multivariate time series classification ( MTSC) t hat generates discriminative temporal rules for the sake of classification. RT generates a new feature space that represents the support of the mined temporal rules which can easily be qualitatively interpreted by domain experts. The algorithm uses Allen’s Interval Algebra to extract the most prominent temporal rules from a given dataset. To our knowledge, this is the first effort to use shapelets as a unit for temporal rule mining studies for the purpose of classification. We evaluate our algorithm on the UEA archive of multivariate time series. Results show that RT produces accuracies superior to state-of-the-art time series classification algorithms with the additional advantage of interpretability. Omar Bahri, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Shah Muhammad Hamdi |
IEEE Big Data | 3 |
| 2022 | SG-CF: Shapelet-Guided Counterfactual Explanation for Time Series ClassificationabstractEXplainable Artificial Intelligence ( XAI) methods have gained much momentum lately given their ability to shed the light on the decision function of opaque machine learning models. There are two dominating XAI paradigms: feature attribution and counterfactual explanation methods. While the first family of methods explains why the model made a decision, counterfactual methods aim at answering what-if the input is slightly different and results in another classification decision. Most of the research efforts have focused on answering the why question for time series data modality. In this paper, we aim at answering the what-if question by finding a good balance between a set of desirable counterfactual explanation properties. We propose Shapelet-guided Counterfactual Explanation (SG-CF), a novel optimization-based model that generates interpretable, intuitive post-hoc counterfactual explanations of time series classification models that balance validity, proximity, sparsity, and contiguity. Our experimental results on nine real-world time-series datasets show that our proposed method can generate counterfactual explanations that balance all the desirable counterfactual properties in comparison with other competing baselines. Omar Bahri, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Shah Muhammad Hamdi |
IEEE Big Data | 3 |
| 2022 | On the Mining of Time Series Data Counterfactual Explanations using BarycentersabstractEXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods are increasingly accepted as effective tools to trace complex machine learning models' decision-making processes. There are two underlying XAI paradigms: (1) traditional factual methods and (2) emerging counterfactual models. The first family of methods uses feature attribution techniques that alter the feature space and observe the impact on the decision function. Counterfactual models aim at providing the smallest possible change to the feature vector that can change the prediction outcome. In this paper, we propose TimeX, a new model-agnostic time series counterfactual explanation algorithm that provides sparse, interpretable, and contiguous explanations. We validate our model using real-world time series datasets and show that our approach can generate explanations with up to 20% fewer outliers in comparison with other state-of-the-art competing baselines. Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Shah Muhammad Hamdi |
CIKM | 1 |
| 2022 | Classifying Minority Stress Disclosure on Social Media with Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory
Cory J. Cascalheira, Shah Muhammad Hamdi, Jillian R. Scheer, Koustuv Saha, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Munmun De Choudhury |
ICWSM | 5 |
| 2021 | Graph-based Clustering for Time Series DataabstractClustering is an important data mining task that consists of grouping data without a prior knowledge of classes. In the recent years, with the rise of big data and its various applications, unsupervised learning such as clustering algorithms have attracted massive interest in the data mining field. For the case of time series data, temporal changes are difficult to detect, which makes the clustering for temporal sequence data more complex than traditional vector data. In this paper, we propose a new model that generates graphs from time series data to preserve important relations between different data points. In particular, every time series data will be considered as a node, then edges will be added between nodes if the dynamic time warping distances of time series data achieve a specific threshold, then spectral clustering algorithm is applied to the generated graph. Our results shows that our new proposal time series graph representation outperforms state-of-the-art clustering algorithms. Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Shah Muhammad Hamdi |
IEEE BigData | 2 |
| 2021 | Spatiotemporal event sequence discovery without thresholds
Berkay Aydin, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Ahmet Küçük, Bita Nezamdoust, Rafal A. Angryk |
GeoInformatica | 2 |
| 2020 | On the Mining of the Minimal Set of Time Series Data ShapeletsabstractShapelets, also known as motifs, are time series sequences that have the property of discriminating between time series classes. Lately, shapelets studies have gained a lot of momentum due to their interpretable nature. As opposed to traditional time series classifiers, shapelet-based learners provide a visual representation of the pattern that triggers the classification decision. One of the most challenging issues of shapelet-based classifiers is the generation of a large number of shapelet outputs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort that addresses the high numerosity problem of mined shapelets issue by mining the minimal set of discriminative shapelets for time series data. We propose a new shapelet mining learner, 1DCNN, that has the property of learning shapelets of different lengths using a black-box neural network model. 1DCNN optimizes the entire classification schema by learning the shapes of the representative patterns. Our proposed model uses network pruning to sparsify the network and keep only the most discriminative shapelets without compromising the classification accuracy. We validated our model using 59 real-world time series datasets from the UCR repository. Our experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach in comparison with other competing baselines models. For fairness purposes, we did not compare 1DCNN with ensemble based approaches that encapsulates many learners. Our results show that the performance of our model is superior to all other baselines pertaining to the shapelet-based classifier category, with up to 95% less Floating Points Operations per Second (FLOPs) required by the network. Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Shah Muhammad Hamdi, Ruizhe Ma, Rafal A. Angryk |
IEEE BigData | 1 |
| 2019 | Solar Pre-Flare Classification with Time Series ProfilingabstractSpace weather encapsulates the impact of variable solar activity on the vicinity of Earth and elsewhere in the solar system. A major agent of space weather, with significant effort already devoted to its prediction, is solar flares. Most existing analysis in this direction focus on the instantaneous (point-in-time) magnitude of various pre-flare parameters in flare host locations, solar active regions. Nonetheless, a recent trend places data-intensive studies, focusing on the pre-flare time series of these parameters, to the forefront. We take on this task in this study, focusing on the shape of pre-flare active region parameter time series by introducing a data-driven class profiling and clustering of these time series. We rely on data provided by the Space Weather ANalytics for Solar Flares (SWAN-SF) benchmark dataset. Our results indicate some potentially interesting temporal patterns that are unrelated to parameter magnitudes and may be used, both in tandem and independently from magnitudes, for future flare forecasting efforts. Our analysis also provides flexibility to define custom flare classes relying on pre-flare time series behavior and relate them to the existing, conventional NOAA / GOES flare classes. Ruizhe Ma, Azim Ahmadzadeh, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Manolis K. Georgoulis, Rafal A. Angryk |
IEEE BigData | 3 |
| 2019 | Tensor Decomposition-based Node EmbeddingabstractIn recent years, node embedding algorithms, which learn low dimensional vector representations for nodes in a graph, have been one of the key research interests of the graph mining community. The existing algorithms either rely on computationally expensive eigendecomposition of the large matrices, or require tuning of the word embedding-based hyperparameters as a result of representing the graph as a node sequence similar to the sentences in a document. Moreover, the latent features produced by these algorithms are hard to interpret. In this paper, we present Tensor Decomposition-based Node Embedding (TDNE), a novel model for learning node representations for arbitrary types of graphs: undirected, directed, and/or weighted. Our model preserves the local and global structural properties of a graph by constructing a third-order tensor using the k-step transition probability matrices and decomposing the tensor through CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition in order to produce an interpretable, low dimensional vector space for the nodes. Our experimental evaluation using two well-known social network datasets proves TDNE to be interpretable with respect to the understandability of the feature space, and precise with respect to the network reconstruction. Shah Muhammad Hamdi, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Rafal A. Angryk |
CIKM | 2 |
| 2018 | Heuristics Significance of Neuro-Ensemble-based Time Series ClassificationabstractEnsemble learning is a popular paradigm for improving the predictive performance of individual classifiers. In this work, we approach the problem of ensemble learning from an optimization perspective applied on time series data. We propose Neuro-Ensemble, a classifier fusion model based on a shallow Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) meta-learner. The neural network learns the expertise of each classifier in the ensemble and optimizes the entire classification schema based on class-level expertise weights. We defined and compared three different classifiers ordering heuristics: Random, BestFirst, and BestLast, that we coupled with our new ensemble technique. We validated our Neuro-Ensemble on 43 real-world time series datasets from the UCR repository. Our experimental results shows the competitiveness of our approach with respect to Evaluation and Selection and that the use of heuristics with Neuro-Ensemble model is insignificant. Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Rafal A. Angryk |
IEEE BigData | 1 |
| 2018 | Segmentation of Time Series in Improving Dynamic Time WarpingabstractSince its introduction to the computer science community, the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm has demonstrated good performance with time series data. While this elastic measure is known for its effectiveness with time series sequence comparisons, the possibility of pathological warping paths weakens the algorithms potential considerably. Techniques centering on pruning off impossible mappings or lowering data dimensions such as windowing, slope weighting, step pattern, and approximation have been proposed over the years to reduce the possibility of pathological warping paths with Dynamic Time Warping. However, because the current DTW improvement techniques are mostly global methods, they are either limited in effect or limit the warping path excessively. We believe segmenting time series at significant feature points will alleviate some of the pathological warpings, and at the same time allowing us to obtain more intuitive warpings. Our heuristic approaches the problem from the human perspective of sequence comparison: by identifying global similarity before local similarities. We use easily identifiable peaks as the significant feature. The final distance is the DTW distance sum of all segments of time series. In this paper, we explore the impact of different peak identification parameters on Dynamic Time Warping and demonstrate how segmentation can help to avoid pathological warpings. Ruizhe Ma, Azim Ahmadzadeh, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Rafal A. Angryk |
IEEE BigData | 3 |
| 2018 | Time Series Distance Density Cluster with Statistical Preprocessing
Ruizhe Ma, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Rafal A. Angryk |
DaWaK | 2 |
| 2018 | Neuro-Ensemble for Time Series Data ClassificationabstractCombining a set of classification algorithms is a powerful technique in improving the accuracy of individual classifiers. There are two main paradigms in combining classifiers: classifier selection, where each classifier is considered as an expert in some local area of the feature space, and classifier fusion, where all classifiers are trained over the entire feature space and they are considered as competitive and complementary to each other. In this paper, we propose a new ensemble technique, NeuroEnsemble, that follows the classifier fusion paradigm applied on time series data. The Neuro-Ensemble exploits the idea that different classifiers participating in the ensemble have varying degrees of expertise on learning different class labels and it optimizes the ensemble using a shallow Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) based meta-learner to capture the expertise of individual classifiers. Every neuron in the MLP represents a classifier that contributes with a vote and performs activation and state computations. This work is the first attempt to train a neural network for learning the expertise of each classifier in an ensemble and optimize the entire classification schema based on class-level expertise weights. We validated our Neuro-Ensemble on 43 real-world time series datasets from the UCR repository. Our experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach in comparison with individual baseline learners and ensemble techniques. Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Ruizhe Ma, Rafal A. Angryk |
DSAA | 1 |
| 2017 | On the prediction of >100 MeV solar energetic particle events using GOES satellite dataabstractSolar energetic particles are a result of intense solar events such as solar flares and Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs). These latter events all together can cause major disruptions to spacecraft that are in Earth's orbit and outside of the magnetosphere. In this work we are interested in establishing the necessary conditions for a major geo-effective solar particle storm immediately after a major flare, namely the existence of a direct magnetic connection. To our knowledge, this is the first work that explores not only the correlations of GOES X-ray and proton channels, but also the correlations that happen across all the proton channels. We found that proton channels autocorrelations and cross-correlations may also be precursors to the occurrence of an SEP event. In this paper, we tackle the problem of predicting >100 MeV SEP events from a multivariate time series perspective using easily interpretable decision tree models. Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Berkay Aydin, Petrus C. Martens, Rafal A. Angryk |
IEEE BigData | 1 |
| 2017 | A time series classification-based approach for solar flare predictionabstractSolar flare prediction is an important task because of their potential impacts on both space and terrestrial infrastructure. This prediction task can be modeled as a binary classification between flaring and non-flaring Active Regions. Previous works on flare prediction focused on representing flaring and non-flaring Active Region examples in vector space, where the feature space was found from the Active Region magnetic field parameters. We extract time series samples of these Active Region parameters and present a flare prediction method based on the k-NN classification of the univariate time series. We find that, for our classification task, using a statistical summarization on the time series of a single Active Region parameter, called total unsigned current helicity, outperforms the use of all Active Region parameters at a single instant of time. Additionally, we present a data model of the flaring/non-flaring Active Regions using multivariate time series. Shah Muhammad Hamdi, Dustin Kempton, Ruizhe Ma, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Rafal A. Angryk |
IEEE BigData | 4 |
| 2017 | Solar flare prediction using multivariate time series decision treesabstractSpace Weather is of rising importance in scientific discipline that describes the way in which the Sun and space impact a myriad of activities down on Earth as well as the safety of the space crew members on board of the space stations. Consequently, it is imperative to better quantify the risk of future space weather events. Most of the flare prediction models in literature use physical parameters of the potentially flaring active regions during a limited interval to gain insights on whether a flare will happen or not. This limits our perception of how an event evolves for an extended duration across multiple parameters. In this paper we followed a data-driven approach to address the problem of flare prediction from a multivariate time series analysis perspective and attempt to cluster potential flaring active regions by applying Distance Density clustering on individual parameters and further organize the clustering results into a multivariate time series decision tree. We compared different data extraction priors and spans, and ranked the importance for different parameters through univariate clustering. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to predict solar flares using a tree structure. Ruizhe Ma, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Shah Muhammad Hamdi, Rafal A. Angryk |
IEEE BigData | 2 |
| 2017 | An Integrated Solar Database (ISD) with Extended Spatiotemporal Querying Capabilities
Ahmet Küçük, Berkay Aydin, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Dustin Kempton, Rafal A. Angryk |
SSTD | 3 |
| 2016 | Spatio-temporal interpolation methods for solar events metadataabstractThis paper introduces three interpolation methods that enrich complex evolving region trajectories that are captured every day from numerous ground-based and space-based solar observatories. The interpolation module takes a trajectory as its input and generates an enriched trajectory with interpolated time-geometry pairs. we created three different interpolation techniques that are: MBR-Interpolation (Minimum Bounding Rectangle Interpolation), CP-Interpolation (Complex Polygon Interpolation), and FP-Interpolation (Filament Polygon Interpolation). The methods combine K-means clustering algorithm, shape signature representation, and linear interpolation to generate the missing polygons. This is the first research of this kind that attempts to address the problem of solar big data interpolation. Finally, we outline future improvements and opportunities for solar data interpolation. Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Berkay Aydin, Dustin Kempton, Rafal A. Angryk |
IEEE BigData | 1 |
| 2016 | SOLEV: a video generation framework for solar events from mixed data sources (demo paper)abstractOne of the main strengths of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) is the analysis of spatial and attributive data. Spatiotemporal interpolation techniques allow the expansion of the collected data to the sites where no samples are available. In the context of GIS, the data, be it interpolated or collected, are visual in nature and hard to understand in raw forms. Visualization of complex evolving region trajectories is often times used as an aid to better understand the data and its underlying patterns. In this work, we created SOLEV, a solar event video generation framework that integrates multiple data sources of solar images. This is the first framework of this kind that not only visualizes spatial solar event boundaries, but also the tracked and interpolated spatiotemporal trajectories they form over time. Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Berkay Aydin, Dustin Kempton, Rafal A. Angryk |
SIGSPATIAL/GIS | 1 |