# Statistical Inference for the Dynamic Time Warping Distance, with Application to Abnormal Time-Series Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.06593 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06593/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Soft-DTW: a Differentiable Loss Function for Time-Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01541/) (2017)
- [A review on outlier/anomaly detection in time series data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04236/) (2020)
- [Exact post-selection inference, with application to the lasso](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.6238/) (2013)
- [Optimal Inference After Model Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.2597/) (2014)
- [Exact Post-Selection Inference for Sequential Regression Procedures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1401.3889/) (2014)
- [Selective Inference for Hierarchical Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02936/) (2020)
- [Valid Inference Corrected for Outlier Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10635/) (2017)
- [Testing for a Change in Mean After Changepoint Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04291/) (2019)
- [Computing Valid p-value for Optimal Changepoint by Selective Inference using Dynamic Programming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09132/) (2020)
- [More Powerful Conditional Selective Inference for Generalized Lasso by Parametric Programming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04920/) (2021)
- [Computing Valid p-values for Image Segmentation by Selective Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00629/) (2019)
- [More powerful post-selection inference, with application to the Lasso](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09037/) (2018)
- [Selective Inference for Group-Sparse Linear Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08211/) (2016)
- [Quantifying Statistical Significance of Neural Network-based Image Segmentation by Selective Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01823/) (2020)
- [Post-Selection Inference for Changepoint Detection Algorithms with Application to Copy Number Variation Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03644/) (2018)
- [Selecting the number of principal components: estimation of the true rank of a noisy matrix](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.8260/) (2014)
- [A significance test for forward stepwise model selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.3920/) (2014)
- [Conditional Selective Inference for Robust Regression and Outlier Detection using Piecewise-Linear Homotopy Continuation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10840/) (2021)
- [Fast and More Powerful Selective Inference for Sparse High-order Interaction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04929/) (2021)
- [Tree-Values: selective inference for regression trees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07816/) (2021)
- [Selective Inference for Change Point Detection in Multi-dimensional Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00514/) (2017)
- [Valid and Exact Statistical Inference for Multi-dimensional Multiple Change-Points by Selective Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08989/) (2021)
- [Selective inference in regression models with groups of variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.01478/) (2015)
- [Approximate selective inference via maximum likelihood](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07884/) (2019)
- [Integrative Methods for Post-Selection Inference Under Convex Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08824/) (2016)
- [Exact Statistical Inference for the Wasserstein Distance by Selective Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14206/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We study statistical inference on the similarity/distance between two time-series under uncertain environment by considering a statistical hypothesis test on the distance obtained from Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm. The sampling distribution of the DTW distance is too difficult to derive because it is obtained based on the solution of the DTW algorithm, which is complicated. To circumvent this difficulty, we propose to employ the conditional selective inference framework, which enables us to derive a valid inference method on the DTW distance. To our knowledge, this is the first method that can provide a valid p-value to quantify the statistical significance of the DTW distance, which is helpful for high-stake decision making such as abnormal time-series detection problems. We evaluate the performance of the proposed inference method on both synthetic and real-world datasets.