2024/03/14 by Ziyu Liu, Liu, Ziyu, Azadeh Alavi +5
Computer Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Emerging Technologies (cs.ET) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Neural Networks and Applications #Time Series Analysis and Forecasting
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2403.09809
openalex publication_date 2024/03/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has recently emerged as a powerful approach to learning representations from large-scale unlabeled data, showing promising results in time series analysis. The self-supervised representation learning can be categorized into two mainstream: contrastive and generative. In this paper, we will present a comprehensive comparative study between contrastive and generative methods in time series. We first introduce the basic frameworks for contrastive and generative SSL, respectively, and discuss how to obtain the supervision signal that guides the model optimization. We then implement classical algorithms (SimCLR vs. MAE) for each type and conduct a comparative analysis in fair settings. Our results provide insights into the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and offer practical recommendations for choosing suitable SSL methods. We also discuss the implications of our findings for the broader field of representation learning and propose future research directions. All the code and data are released at \urlhttps://github.com/DL4mHealth/SSLComparison.