Introduction

Similarity Analysis

The SIMILARITY procedure computes similarity measures associated with time-stamped data, time series, and other sequentially ordered numeric data. The SIMILARITY procedure includes the following features:

  • ability to accumulate time-stamped data into a time series

  • missing value interpretation

  • zero value interpretation

  • functional transformations of time series, including the following:

    • log (LOG)

    • square-root (SQRT)

    • logistic (LOGISTIC)

    • Box-Cox (BOXCOX)

    • user-defined transformations

  • simple differencing and seasonal differencing

  • time series missing value trimming

  • time warping by compressing or expanding the input sequence with respect to the target sequence

  • sequence normalizations, including the following:

    • standard (STANDARD)

    • absolute (ABSOLUTE)

    • user-defined normalizations

  • sequence scaling, including the following:

    • standard (STANDARD)

    • absolute (ABSOLUTE)

    • user-defined scaling

  • ability to compute similarity measures, including the following:

    • squared deviation (SQRDEV)

    • absolute deviation (ABSDEV)

    • mean square deviation (MSQRDEV)

    • mean absolute deviation (MABSDEV)

    • user-defined similarity measures

  • sliding similarity measures analysis with three types of sequence sliding:

    • no sliding

    • slide by time index

    • slide by season index

  • support for large data sets

Last updated: June 19, 2025