Randomized trees for time series representation and similarity

•Representation learning is difficult when time series contain irregularities.•Rand-TS is a time series representation learning framework based on random trees.•Rand-TS can work with both univariate and multivariate time series.•Rand-TS can work with time series with varying length and missing information.•Allows incorporating additional information into the time series representation. Most of the temporal data mining tasks require representations to capture important characteristics of time series. Representation learning is challenging when time series differ in distributional characteristics and/or show irregularities such as varying lengths and missing observations. Moreover, when time series are multivariate, interactions between variables should be modeled efficiently. This study proposes a unified, flexible time series representation learning framework for both univariate and multivariate time series called Rand-TS. Rand-TS models density characteristics of each time series as a time-varying Gaussian distribution using random decision trees and embeds density information into a sparse vector. Rand-TS can work with time series of various lengths and missing observations, furthermore, it allows using customized features. We illustrate the classification performance of Rand-TS on 113 univariate, 19 multivariate along with 15 univariate time series with varying lengths from UCR database. The results show that in addition to its flexibility, Rand-TS provides competitive classification performance.