Extension of frequency-based dissimilarity for retrieving similar plasma waveforms

Some computer-aided assistance in finding the waveforms similar to a waveform has become indispensable for accelerating data analysis in the plasma experiments. For the slowly-varying waveforms and those having time-sectional oscillation patterns, the methods using the Fourier series coefficients of waveforms in calculating the dissimilarity have successfully improved the performance in retrieving similar waveforms. This paper treats severely-varying waveforms, and proposes two extensions to the dissimilarity of waveforms. The first extension is to capture the difference of the importance of the Fourier series coefficients of waveforms against frequency. The second extension is to consider the outlines of waveforms. The correctness of the extended dissimilarity is experimentally evaluated by using the metrics used in evaluating that of the information retrieval, i.e. precision and recall. The experimental results show that the extended dissimilarity could improve the correctness of the similarity retrieval of plasma waveforms.