Self-Supervised Learning for Time Series Analysis: Taxonomy, Progress, and Prospects
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Abstract (arXiv)
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has recently achieved impressive performance on various time series tasks. The most prominent advantage of SSL is that it reduces the dependence on labeled data. Based on the pre-training and fine-tuning strategy, even a small amount of labeled data can achieve high performance. Compared with many published self-supervised surveys on computer vision and natural language processing, a comprehensive survey for time series SSL is still missing. To fill this gap, we review current state-of-the-art SSL methods for time series data in this article. To this end, we first comprehensively review existing surveys related to SSL and time series, and then provide a new taxonomy of existing time series SSL methods by summarizing them from three perspectives: generative-based, contrastive-based, and adversarial-based. These methods are further divided into ten subcategories with detailed reviews and discussions about their key intuitions, main frameworks, advantages and disadvantages. To facilitate the experiments and validation of time series SSL methods, we also summarize datasets commonly used in time series forecasting, classification, anomaly detection, and clustering tasks. Finally, we present the future directions of SSL for time series analysis.
Key facts. Cited by 99 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 146 of its 249 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Jun 2023.
Builds on
146 of 249 references.
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50 most cited of 146 All 146 (JSON)
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- 2023Time-LLM: Time Series Forecasting by Reprogramming Large Language Modelscited by 700
- 2024Unified Training of Universal Time Series Forecasting Transformerscited by 614
- 2023A Survey on Graph Neural Networks for Time Series: Forecasting, Classification, Imputation, and Anomaly Detectioncited by 145
- 2023Large Models for Time Series and Spatio-Temporal Data: A Survey and Outlookcited by 110
- 2024VisionTS: Visual Masked Autoencoders Are Free-Lunch Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasterscited by 88
- 2024Time-MMD: Multi-Domain Multimodal Dataset for Time Series Analysiscited by 74
- 2024Position: What Can Large Language Models Tell Us about Time Series Analysiscited by 47
- 2024Towards a General Time Series Anomaly Detector with Adaptive Bottlenecks and Dual Adversarial Decoderscited by 38
- 2024Towards Neural Scaling Laws for Time Series Foundation Modelscited by 33
- 2024Universal Time-Series Representation Learning: A Surveycited by 30
- 2024Time-FFM: Towards LM-Empowered Federated Foundation Model for Time Series Forecastingcited by 26
- 2023T-Rep: Representation Learning for Time Series using Time-Embeddingscited by 19
12 most cited of 88 All 88 (JSON)
- 2026Seeing Time: Visual-Temporal Representation Learning for Interpretable Time Series Clustering29 Sep 2026
- 2026Learning Cardiac Features: ECG Biometrics Across Time and~Exercise18 Sep 2026
- 2026Does Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture Pretraining Help Time Series Forecasting?16 Sep 2026
- 2026Self-Supervised Graph Representation Learning for In-The-Wild Wearable and Smartphone based Emotion Recognition23 Aug 2026
- 2026Is Self-Pretraining really useful to improve diagnosis in medical Time Series?6 Aug 2026
- 2026Modular Foundation Models for Time-Series Perception in Digital Twins3 Jul 2026
- 2026VLBM: Variational Latent Basis Modeling for OOD Robust Multivariate Time Series Forecasting1 Jun 2026
- 2026Selecting New Measurement Locations to Diversify Traffic-Pattern Coverage: A Real-World Evaluation for Total Traffic Volume Estimation25 May 2026
- 2026On the Role of Inductive Bias in Time-Series Pretraining: A Case Study in Learning Generalizable Representations for Clinical Time Series25 May 2026
- 2026CALAD: Channel-Aware contrastive Learning for multivariate time series Anomaly Detection22 May 2026
- 2026TimeGuard: Channel-wise Pool Training for Backdoor Defense in Time Series Forecasting21 May 2026
- 2026When Does Self-Supervised Learning Transfer to Time-Series Tasks?19 May 2026
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