Santos Tiago, Kern Roman
2018
Semiconductor manufacturing processes critically depend on hundreds of highly complex process steps, which may cause critical deviations in the end-product.Hence, a better understanding of wafer test data patterns, which represent stress tests conducted on devices in semiconductor material slices, may lead to an improved production process.However, the shapes and types of these wafer patterns, as well as their relation to single process steps, are unknown.In a first step to address these issues, we tailor and apply a variational auto-encoder (VAE) to wafer pattern images.We find the VAE's generator allows for explorative wafer pattern analysis, andits encoder provides an effective dimensionality reduction algorithm, which, in a clustering application, performs better than several baselines such as t-SNE and yields interpretable clusters of wafer patterns.
Santos Tiago, Walk Simon, Helic Denis
2017
Modeling activity in online collaboration websites, such asStackExchange Question and Answering portals, is becom-ing increasingly important, as the success of these websitescritically depends on the content contributed by its users. Inthis paper, we represent user activity as time series and per-form an initial analysis of these time series to obtain a bet-ter understanding of the underlying mechanisms that governtheir creation. In particular, we are interested in identifyinglatent nonlinear behavior in online user activity as opposedto a simpler linear operating mode. To that end, we applya set of statistical tests for nonlinearity as a means to char-acterize activity time series derived from 16 different onlinecollaboration websites. We validate our approach by com-paring activity forecast performance from linear and nonlin-ear models, and study the underlying dynamical systems wederive with nonlinear time series analysis. Our results showthat nonlinear characterizations of activity time series helpto (i) improve our understanding of activity dynamics in on-line collaboration websites, and (ii) increase the accuracy offorecasting experiments.
Santos Tiago, Kern Roman
2016
This paper provides an overview of current literature on timeseries classification approaches, in particular of early timeseries classification.A very common and effective time series classification ap-proach is the 1-Nearest Neighbor classifier, with differentdistance measures such as the Euclidean or dynamic timewarping distances. This paper starts by reviewing thesebaseline methods.More recently, with the gain in popularity in the applica-tion of deep neural networks to the field of computer vision,research has focused on developing deep learning architec-tures for time series classification as well. The literature inthe field of deep learning for time series classification hasshown promising results.Early time series classification aims to classify a time se-ries with as few temporal observations as possible, whilekeeping the loss of classification accuracy at a minimum.Prominent early classification frameworks reviewed by thispaper include, but are not limited to, ECTS, RelClass andECDIRE. These works have shown that early time seriesclassification may be feasible and performant, but they alsoshow room for improvement