Techniques are described for performing a time series analysis using a clustering based symbolic representation. Implementations employ a clustering based symbolic representation applied to time series data. In some implementations, the time series data is discretized into subsequences with regular time intervals, and symbols encoding the time intervals may be derived by performing clustering algorithms on the subsequences. In the new representation, a time series is transformed into a sequence of categorical values. The symbolic representation is suitable to perform time series classification and forecast with higher accuracy and greater efficiency compared to previously used techniques. Through use of the symbolic representation, a dimension reduction is applied to transform the time sequences to a feature space with lower dimensions. As output of such transformation, a new representation is obtained based on the original time series. This new reduced-dimension representation improves the efficiency of time series data mining and forecasting.