Fusion of Recurrence Plots and Gramian Angular Fields with Bayesian Optimization for Enhanced Time-Series Classification
Maria C. Mariani, Prince Appiah, Osei K. Tweneboah
Abstract
Time-series classification remains a critical task across various domains, demanding models that effectively capture both local recurrence structures and global temporal dependencies. We introduce a novel framework that transforms time series into image representations by fusing recurrence plots (RPs) with both Gramian Angular Summation Fields (GASFs) and Gramian Angular Difference Fields (GADFs). This fusion enriches the structural encoding of temporal dynamics. To ensure optimal performance, Bayesian Optimization is employed to automatically select the ideal image resolution, eliminating the need for manual tuning. Unlike prior methods that rely on individual transformations, our approach concatenates RP, GASF, and GADF into a unified representation and generalizes to multivariate data by stacking transformation channels across sensor dimensions. Experiments on seven univariate datasets show that our method significantly outperforms traditional classifiers such as one-nearest neighbor with Dynamic Time Warping, Shapelet Transform, and RP-based convolutional neural networks. For multivariate tasks, the proposed fusion model achieves macro F1 scores of 91.55% on the UCI Human Activity Recognition dataset and 98.95% on the UCI Room Occupancy Estimation dataset, outperforming standard deep learning baselines. These results demonstrate the robustness and generalizability of our framework, establishing a new benchmark for image-based time-series classification through principled fusion and adaptive optimization.