Fig. 1.

An illustration demonstrating the significance of sequence alignment. (A) Two simplified temporal event sequences; (B) the scoring function to calculate the pairwise patient similarity; global sequence alignment algorithms, DTW (C) and NWA (D); local sequence alignment algorithms, DTWL (E) and SWA (F). The shapes with light blue and dash border are extra medical events inserted by DTW or DTWL during sequence alignment. “_” is a gap spot inserted by NWA or SWA during sequence alignment. The different shapes (e.g., diamond, triangle and circle) represent different medical events. J denotes Jaccard index