  We study the problem of classifying interval-based temporal sequences
(IBTSs). Since common classification algorithms cannot be directly applied to
IBTSs, the main challenge is to define a set of features that effectively
represents the data such that classifiers can be applied. Most prior work
utilizes frequent pattern mining to define a feature set based on discovered
patterns. However, frequent pattern mining is computationally expensive and
often discovers many irrelevant patterns. To address this shortcoming, we
propose the FIBS framework for classifying IBTSs. FIBS extracts features
relevant to classification from IBTSs based on relative frequency and temporal
relations. To avoid selecting irrelevant features, a filter-based selection
strategy is incorporated into FIBS. Our empirical evaluation on eight
real-world datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of our methods in practice.
The results provide evidence that FIBS effectively represents IBTSs for
classification algorithms, which contributes to similar or significantly better
accuracy compared to state-of-the-art competitors. It also suggests that the
feature selection strategy is beneficial to FIBS's performance.
