Abstract: The invention relates to automatic discovery and evaluation of a motion by treating motion recognition as an optimization problem by considering a series of basic motions obtained by segmenting a subject motion. The method comprises segmenting time series data defining a motion of a subject into a plurality of segments, classifying each segment into a class for a basic motion by using time series data of the segment, and converting the motion of the subject to a sequence of high rank symbols in which each high rank symbol is formed from a series of the basic motions, wherein a function that calculates a score based on a set of a high rank symbol and a sequence of basic motions is provided and the motion of the subject is converted to the sequence of the high rank symbols by an optimization calculation using dynamic programming.