In recent years, early classification on time series has become increasingly important in time-sensitive applications. Existing shapelet based methods still cannot work well on this problem. First, the effectiveness of traditional shapelet based methods would be influenced by the number of shapelet candidates. Second, it is difficult for previous methods to obtain diverse shapelets in shapelet selection. In this paper, we propose an Improved Early Distinctive Shapelet Classification method named IEDSC. We first present a new method to more precisely measure the similarity between time series, which takes into account of the relative trend of time series. Second, in shapelet extraction, we propose a pruning technique to reduce the number of shapelets by predicting the starting positions of shapelets with good quality. In addition, a new shapelet selection method is also proposed to remove the similar shapelets, so as to maintain the diversity of shapelets. Finally, the experimental results on 16 benchmark datasets show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art for early classification on time series.