DiaSeg: Diagonal Segment Extraction from DTW Paths for Interpretable Gait Analysis

Abstract

Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is the dominant approach for measuring similarity between time series, yet standard practice discards the optimal warping path after computing a single distance value, losing local alignment information most relevant to clinical diagnosis. We introduce DiaSeg, a framework that extracts diagonal segments from DTW paths with controlled breaks, characterizing each segment by five geometric features (effective length, interruption count, cost variation, temporal position, and path context), and enabling unsupervised pattern discovery without domain-specific feature engineering. Validated on 91 subjects across six clinical conditions (healthy aging, Parkinson's, Huntington's, ALS, brain tumor, and stroke), three findings emerge. First, diagonal segments form consistent unsupervised patterns (silhouette 0.33) aligned with biomechanical phase annotations, with label-based validation confirming near-perfect separation of healthy and pathological gait (ARI up to 0.986). Second, segments discriminate pathology at 69% (supervised) and 75% (patient-level clustering), with pathology manifesting through distributional shifts in segment length; combining segment and cycle-level features further improves classification to 91.7%. Third, while cycle-based methods achieve higher accuracy (91%), diagonal segments provide phase-specific interpretability unavailable in global representations, localizing where coordination breaks down within the gait cycle. DiaSeg thus transforms DTW from a black-box distance into a source of interpretable temporal features for neurodegenerative disease assessment.