# Set Functions for Time Series

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.12064 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12064/

## Key facts

- Cited by 138 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 138)

- [Self-Supervised Contrastive Pre-Training For Time Series via Time-Frequency Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08496/) (2022)
- [Multi-Time Attention Networks for Irregularly Sampled Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10318/) (2021)
- [SAITS: Self-Attention-based Imputation for Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08516/) (2022)
- [Graph-Guided Network for Irregularly Sampled Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05357/) (2021)
- [Modeling Irregular Time Series with Continuous Recurrent Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11344/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Transformer for Sparse and Irregularly Sampled Multivariate Clinical Time-Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14293/) (2021)
- [Time Series as Images: Vision Transformer for Irregularly Sampled Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12799/) (2023)
- [FuseMoE: Mixture-of-Experts Transformers for Fleximodal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03226/) (2024)
- [Closed-form Continuous-time Neural Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13898/) (2021)
- [Asynchrony-Robust Collaborative Perception via Bird's Eye View Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16940/) (2023)
- [Warpformer: A Multi-scale Modeling Approach for Irregular Clinical Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09368/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Irregular Time Series Forecasting: A Simple yet Effective Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11250/) (2025)
- [HiRID-ICU-Benchmark -- A Comprehensive Machine Learning Benchmark on High-resolution ICU Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08536/) (2021)
- [Improving Medical Predictions by Irregular Multimodal Electronic Health Records Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12156/) (2022)
- [Neighborhood Contrastive Learning Applied to Online Patient Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05142/) (2021)
- [NRTSI: Non-Recurrent Time Series Imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03340/) (2021)
- [Learning Missing Modal Electronic Health Records with Unified Multi-modal Data Embedding and Modality-Aware Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02504/) (2023)
- [Probabilistic Imputation for Time-series Classification with Missing Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06738/) (2023)
- [Irregular Traffic Time Series Forecasting Based on Asynchronous Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16818/) (2023)
- [Latent SDEs on Homogeneous Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16248/) (2023)
- [HyperIMTS: Hypergraph Neural Network for Irregular Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17431/) (2025)
- [Temporal Label Smoothing for Early Event Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13764/) (2022)
- [Time Series Language Model for Descriptive Caption Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01832/) (2025)
- [Learning Neural Set Functions Under the Optimal Subset Oracle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01693/) (2022)
- [Stop&Hop: Early Classification of Irregular Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09795/) (2022)
- [On the Importance of Clinical Notes in Multi-modal Learning for EHR Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03044/) (2022)
- [TimeCHEAT: A Channel Harmony Strategy for Irregularly Sampled Multivariate Time Series Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12886/) (2024)
- [A Systematic Literature Review of Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Network Models for Time Series Forecasting and Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22377/) (2024)
- [Bridging Time and Frequency: A Joint Modeling Framework for Irregular Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00582/) (2026)
- [TimEHR: Image-based Time Series Generation for Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06318/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite the eminent successes of deep neural networks, many architectures are often hard to transfer to irregularly-sampled and asynchronous time series that commonly occur in real-world datasets, especially in healthcare applications. This paper proposes a novel approach for classifying irregularly-sampled time series with unaligned measurements, focusing on high scalability and data efficiency. Our method SeFT (Set Functions for Time Series) is based on recent advances in differentiable set function learning, extremely parallelizable with a beneficial memory footprint, thus scaling well to large datasets of long time series and online monitoring scenarios. Furthermore, our approach permits quantifying per-observation contributions to the classification outcome. We extensively compare our method with existing algorithms on multiple healthcare time series datasets and demonstrate that it performs competitively whilst significantly reducing runtime.