# Dynamic State Warping

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.01141 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01141/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [TILDE-Q: A Transformation Invariant Loss Function for Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15050/) (2022)
- [TrajSurv: Learning Continuous Latent Trajectories from Electronic Health Records for Trustworthy Survival Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00657/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The ubiquity of sequences in many domains enhances significant recent interest in sequence learning, for which a basic problem is how to measure the distance between sequences. Dynamic time warping (DTW) aligns two sequences by nonlinear local warping and returns a distance value. DTW shows superior ability in many applications, e.g. video, image, etc. However, in DTW, two points are paired essentially based on point-to-point Euclidean distance (ED) without considering the autocorrelation of sequences. Thus, points with different semantic meanings, e.g. peaks and valleys, may be matched providing their coordinate values are similar. As a result, DTW is sensitive to noise and poorly interpretable. This paper proposes an efficient and flexible sequence alignment algorithm, dynamic state warping (DSW). DSW converts each time point into a latent state, which endows point-wise autocorrelation information. Alignment is performed by using the state sequences. Thus DSW is able to yield alignment that is semantically more interpretable than that of DTW. Using one nearest neighbor classifier, DSW shows significant improvement on classification accuracy in comparison to ED (70/85 wins) and DTW (74/85 wins). We also empirically demonstrate that DSW is more robust and scales better to long sequences than ED and DTW.