A failure prediction system is provided. The system includes a model-based signature generator generating feature vectors from individual attributes of multi-variate time series data based on sequence importance and attribute importance. The system further includes a knowledge database storing feature vectors corresponding to a set of different failure types. The system also includes a set of similarity detectors. Each detect any of the feature vectors generated by the model-based signature generator that are similar to any of the feature vectors corresponding to a respective one of the different failure types stored in the knowledge database based on a similarity threshold and output the respective one of the different failure types and a likely time period when the respective one of the different failure types will occur.