  At the light of regularized dynamic time warping kernels, this paper
reconsider the concept of time elastic centroid (TEC) for a set of time series.
From this perspective, we show first how TEC can easily be addressed as a
preimage problem. Unfortunately this preimage problem is ill-posed, may suffer
from over-fitting especially for long time series and getting a sub-optimal
solution involves heavy computational costs. We then derive two new algorithms
based on a probabilistic interpretation of kernel alignment matrices that
expresses in terms of probabilistic distributions over sets of alignment paths.
The first algorithm is an iterative agglomerative heuristics inspired from the
state of the art DTW barycenter averaging (DBA) algorithm proposed specifically
for the Dynamic Time Warping measure. The second proposed algorithm achieves a
classical averaging of the aligned samples but also implements an averaging of
the time of occurrences of the aligned samples. It exploits a straightforward
progressive agglomerative heuristics. An experimentation that compares for 45
time series datasets classification error rates obtained by first near
neighbors classifiers exploiting a single medoid or centroid estimate to
represent each categories show that: i) centroids based approaches
significantly outperform medoids based approaches, ii) on the considered
experience, the two proposed algorithms outperform the state of the art DBA
algorithm, and iii) the second proposed algorithm that implements an averaging
jointly in the sample space and along the time axes emerges as the most
significantly robust time elastic averaging heuristic with an interesting noise
reduction capability. Index Terms-Time series averaging Time elastic kernel
Dynamic Time Warping Time series clustering and classification.
