Recent literature has reported symbolic time series analysis of complex systems for real-time anomaly detection. A crucial aspect in this analysis is symbol sequence generation from the observed time series data. This paper presents a wavelet-based partitioning, instead of the currently practiced method of phase-space partitioning, for symbol generation. The partitioning algorithm makes use of the maximum entropy method. The wavelet-space and phase-space partitioning methods are compared with regard to anomaly detection using experimental data.