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I have a dataset of the number of steps people take throughout a day over a period of months. I aggregated them so that each person will have an average weekday and weekend time series of steps. An example is below:

ID Weekday 00:00 00:30 01:00 ........ 23:00 23:30
A    1       20    30    23             154  256
A    0       15    67    121            35   101
B    1       78    21    46             78   26
B    0       55    301   22             121  451

I have tried clustering using K-means, agglomerative hierarchical and dynamic time warping by combining both weekdays and weekends together (i.e each person only has 1 case of data), and it appears to show 2 distinct groups of people, one group with generally higher levels than the other group.

How can I do clustering while also taking in account whether it is on a weekday or weekend? So for example, there might be a few clusters: one with high weekday activity and low weekend activity, one with high - high, another with low - low, etc?

I am not sure what the terminology is in this case: multidimensional time series? multivariate clustering?

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As you don't do any alignments you can simply concatenate the two vectors.

KMeans will then minimize variance in both weekdays and weekends.

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  • $\begingroup$ Can I use hierarchical clustering if I concatenate them together? $\endgroup$
    – TYL
    May 13, 2019 at 1:58
  • $\begingroup$ And would you suggest using kmeans or hierarchical for my data? $\endgroup$
    – TYL
    May 13, 2019 at 3:00
  • $\begingroup$ Depends on what objective function you deem more appropriate for your problem. $\endgroup$
    – Has QUIT--Anony-Mousse
    May 13, 2019 at 6:15

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