Data stream values are often associated with multiple
aspects. For example, each value observed at a given time-stamp from environmental sensors may have an associated type (e.g., temperature,
humidity, etc) as well as location. Time-stamp, type and location are the three aspects, which can be modeled using a tensor
(high-order array). However, the time aspect is special, with a natural ordering, and with successive time-ticks having usually
correlated values. Standard multiway analysis ignores this structure. To capture it, we propose
2 Heads Tensor Analysis (2-heads), which provides a qualitatively different treatment on time. Unlike most existing approaches that use a PCA-like
summarization scheme for all aspects, 2-heads treats the time aspect carefully. 2-heads combines the power of classic multilinear
analysis (PARAFAC [1], Tucker [5], DTA/STA [3], WTA [2]) with wavelets, leading to a powerful mining tool. Furthermore, 2-heads
has several other advantages as well: (a) it can be computed incrementally in a streaming fashion, (b) it has a provable error
guarantee and, (c) it achieves significant compression ratio against competitors. Finally, we show experiments on real datasets,
and we illustrate how 2-heads reveals interesting trends in the data.
This is an extended abstract of an article published in the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal [4].