title: Information-Aware Time Series Meta-Contrastive Learning
abstract: Various contrastive learning approaches have been proposed in recent years and achieve significant empirical success. While effective and prevalent, contrastive learning has been less explored for time series data. A key component of contrastive learning is to select appropriate augmentations imposing some priors to construct feasible positive samples, such that an encoder can be trained to learn robust and discriminative representations. Unlike image and language domains where ``desired'' augmented samples can be generated with the rule of thumb guided by prefabricated human priors, the ad-hoc manual selection of time series augmentations is hindered by their diverse and human-unrecognizable temporal structures. How to find the desired augmentations of time series data that are meaningful for given contrastive learning tasks and datasets remains an open question. In this work, we address the problem by encouraging both high fidelity and variety based upon information theory. A theoretical analysis leads to the criteria for selecting feasible data augmentations. On top of that, we employ the meta-learning mechanism and propose an information-aware approach, InfoTS, that adaptively selects optimal time series augmentations for contrastive representation learning. The meta-learner and the encoder are jointly optimized in an end-to-end manner to avoid sub-optimal solutions. Experiments on various datasets show highly competitive performance with up to 11.4%  reduction in MSE on the forecasting task and up to 2.8% relative improvement in accuracy on the classification task over the leading baselines.
authors: Dongsheng Luo Wei Cheng Yingheng Wang Dongkuan Xu Jingchao Ni Wenchao Yu Xuchao Zhang Yanchi Liu Haifeng Chen Xiang Zhang
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