{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/amercing-an-intuitive-elegant-and-effective","title":"Amercing: An Intuitive, Elegant and Effective Constraint for Dynamic Time Warping","arxiv_id":"2111.13314","date":"2021-11-26","proceeding":null,"authors":["Matthieu Herrmann","Geoffrey I. Webb"],"abstract":"Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), and its constrained (CDTW) and weighted (WDTW) variants, are time series distances with a wide range of applications. They minimize the cost of non-linear alignments between series. CDTW and WDTW have been introduced because DTW is too permissive in its alignments. However, CDTW uses a crude step function, allowing unconstrained flexibility within the window, and none beyond it. WDTW's multiplicative weight is relative to the distances between aligned points along a warped path, rather than being a direct function of the amount of warping that is introduced. In this paper, we introduce Amerced Dynamic Time Warping (ADTW), a new, intuitive, DTW variant that penalizes the act of warping by a fixed additive cost. Like CDTW and WDTW, ADTW constrains the amount of warping. However, it avoids both abrupt discontinuities in the amount of warping allowed and the limitations of a multiplicative penalty. We formally introduce ADTW, prove some of its properties, and discuss its parameterization. We show on a simple example how it can be parameterized to achieve an intuitive outcome, and demonstrate its usefulness on a standard time series classification benchmark. We provide a demonstration application in C++.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.13314v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.13314v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"amercing-an-intuitive-elegant-and-effective","repo_url":"https://github.com/MonashTS/tempo","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"BSD-3-Clause"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"dynamic-time-warping","task_name":"Dynamic Time Warping"},{"task_slug":"time-series-1","task_name":"Time Series"},{"task_slug":"time-series","task_name":"Time Series Analysis"},{"task_slug":"time-series-classification","task_name":"Time Series Classification"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"dtw","method_name":"DTW"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}