The shapelet transform is a form of feature extraction for time series, in
which a time series is described by its similarity to each of a collection of
`shapelets'. However it has previously suffered from a number of limitations,
such as being limited to regularly-spaced fully-observed time series, and
having to choose between efficient training and interpretability. Here, we
extend the method to continuous time, and in doing so handle the general case
of irregularly-sampled partially-observed multivariate time series.
Furthermore, we show that a simple regularisation penalty may be used to train
efficiently without sacrificing interpretability. The continuous-time
formulation additionally allows for learning the length of each shapelet
(previously a discrete object) in a differentiable manner. Finally, we
demonstrate that the measure of similarity between time series may be
generalised to a learnt pseudometric. We validate our method by demonstrating
its performance and interpretability on several datasets; for example we
discover (purely from data) that the digits 5 and 6 may be distinguished by the
chirality of their bottom loop, and that a kind of spectral gap exists in
spoken audio classification.

本研究扩展了形态子序列变换方法以处理不规则采样的多元时间序列，并通过连续时间公式学习形态子序列的长度和时间序列之间的相似度，同时保持了高效性和可解释性。