CompEngine: a self-organizing, living library of time-series data

Abstract: Modern biomedical applications often involve time-series data, from high-throughput phenotyping of model organisms, through to individual disease diagnosis and treatment using biomedical data streams. Data and tools for time-series analysis are developed and applied across the sciences and in industry, but meaningful cross-disciplinary interactions are limited by the challenge of identifying fruitful connections. Here we introduce the web platform, CompEngine, a self-organizing, living library of time-series data that lowers the barrier to forming meaningful interdisciplinary connections between time series. Using a canonical feature-based representation, CompEngine places all time series in a common space, regardless of their origin, allowing users to upload their data and immediately explore interdisciplinary connections to other data with similar properties, and be alerted when similar data is uploaded in the future. In contrast to conventional databases, which are organized by assigned metadata, CompEngine incentivizes data sharing by automatically connecting experimental and theoretical scientists across disciplines based on the empirical structure of their data. CompEngine's growing library of interdisciplinary time-series data also facilitates comprehensively characterization of algorithm performance across diverse types of data, and can be used to empirically motivate the development of new time-series analysis algorithms.