Rondo: Unsupervised Discovery of Recurring Temporal Structure
Yingtian Shi, Ankith Chandra, Thomas Plötz
Abstract
Many real-world time series data exhibit structural properties at multiple scales, from short, recurring units to complex sequences composed of these units. Unsupervised discovery of both these components and structure enables the design of intelligent systems that help interpret temporal data, thereby limiting the amount of costly human annotations required. Existing modeling approaches typically overlook the hierarchical structure inherent to many time series, treating recurring patterns at different temporal scales as independent structures. Moreover, most assume access to the complete data sequence and treat discovery as a static process, limiting their ability to evolve as new observations arrive. We introduce Rondo, an unsupervised approach for modeling recurring hierarchical structure in continuous temporal streams. By explicitly constructing vocabularies of reusable units and their recurring compositions, Rondo captures structure shared across complex temporal patterns while refining and expanding its discoveries as the stream evolves. Evaluations on temporal sequences spanning diverse domains and data modalities show that Rondo outperforms existing unsupervised recurrence-discovery baselines, with particularly pronounced advantages in limited-data and continual-stream settings. These capabilities provide a stronger foundation for recurring-pattern discovery, scalable behavior understanding, and adaptive intelligent systems operating on long, unlabeled temporal streams.