  Time series clustering is a central machine learning task with applications
in many fields. While the majority of the methods focus on real-valued time
series, very few works consider series with discrete response. In this paper,
the problem of clustering ordinal time series is addressed. To this aim, two
novel distances between ordinal time series are introduced and used to
construct fuzzy clustering procedures. Both metrics are functions of the
estimated cumulative probabilities, thus automatically taking advantage of the
ordering inherent to the series' range. The resulting clustering algorithms are
computationally efficient and able to group series generated from similar
stochastic processes, reaching accurate results even though the series come
from a wide variety of models. Since the dynamic of the series may vary over
the time, we adopt a fuzzy approach, thus enabling the procedures to locate
each series into several clusters with different membership degrees. An
extensive simulation study shows that the proposed methods outperform several
alternative procedures. Weighted versions of the clustering algorithms are also
presented and their advantages with respect to the original methods are
discussed. Two specific applications involving economic time series illustrate
the usefulness of the proposed approaches.
