AttDCT: Attention-Based Deep Learning Approach for Time Series Classification in the DCT Domain

This article proposes a new deep learning framework for time series classification in the discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain with spectral enhancement and self-attention mechanisms. The time series signal is first partitioned into discrete segments. Each segment is rearranged into a matrix using a sliding window. The signal matrix is then transformed to spectral coefficients using a two-dimensional (2-D) DCT. This is followed by logarithmic contrast enhancement and spectral normalization to enhance the DCT coefficients. The resulting enhanced coefficient matrix serves as input to a deep neural network architecture comprising a self-attention layer, a multilayer convolutional neural network (CNN), and a fully connected multilayer perceptron (MLP) for classification. The AttDCT CNN model is evaluated and benchmarked on 13 different time series classification problems. The experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning methods by an average of 2.1% in classification accuracy. It achieves higher classification accuracy on ten of the problems and similar results on the remaining three.