Analysis of data without labels is commonly subject to scrutiny by
unsupervised machine learning techniques. Such techniques provide more
meaningful representations, useful for better understanding of a problem at
hand, than by looking only at the data itself. Although abundant expert
knowledge exists in many areas where unlabelled data is examined, such
knowledge is rarely incorporated into automatic analysis. Incorporation of
expert knowledge is frequently a matter of combining multiple data sources from
disparate hypothetical spaces.
The search for patterns or motifs in data represents an area of key interest
to many researchers. In this paper we present the Motif Tracking Algorithm, a
novel immune inspired pattern identification tool that is able to identify
unknown motifs which repeat within time series data. The power of the algorithm
is derived from its use of a small number of parameters with minimal
assumptions. The algorithm searches from a completely neutral perspective that
is independent of the data being analysed, and the underlying motifs.
As introduced by Bentley et al. (2005), artificial immune systems (AIS) are
lacking tissue, which is present in one form or another in all living
multi-cellular organisms. Some have argued that this concept in the context of
AIS brings little novelty to the already saturated field of the immune inspired
computational research. This article aims to show that such a component of an
AIS has the potential to bring an advantage to a data processing algorithm in
terms of data pre-processing, clustering and extraction of features desired by
the immune inspired system.