Data mining of financial time series and pattern discovery - beyond technical analysis?

There are lot of works about pattern discovery in financial time series - but all of them (known to me) are connected with technical analysis and that is field (as said by many) that is not rigorous science. So - are there pattern discovery approaches that goes beyond technical analysis and that can be called science - e.g. ones that try to discover parameters of hidden markov model or that otherwise try to model the different financial regimes as responses to the macroeconomic events (e.g. country's position in the economic cycle) or as responses to the other events, e.g. by changing tax legislation, by monetary policy changes (interest rate etc.), by governments' stimulus efforts, etc.?