# Graph-Aware Contrasting for Multivariate Time-Series Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.05202 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05202/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04875/) (2017)
- [TS2Vec: Towards Universal Representation of Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10466/) (2021)
- [Time-Series Representation Learning via Temporal and Contextual Contrasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14112/) (2021)
- [Graph Neural Network-Based Anomaly Detection in Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06947/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Contrastive Pre-Training For Time Series via Time-Frequency Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08496/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning for Time Series with Temporal Neighborhood Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00750/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning for Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition: Overview, Challenges and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07416/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Time-Series Representation Learning with Iterative Bilinear Temporal-Spectral Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04770/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Time Series Representation Learning via Cross Reconstruction Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09928/) (2022)
- [Label-efficient Time Series Representation Learning: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06433/) (2023)
- [Multi-Task Self-Supervised Time-Series Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01034/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [DisMS-TS: Eliminating Redundant Multi-Scale Features for Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04600/) (2025)
- [Graph Generation Powered with LLMs for Boosting Multivariate Time-Series Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03645/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Graph Neural Networks for Remaining Useful Life Prediction: Methodologies, Evaluation and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19629/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Spatio-Temporal EEG data Analysis: from Models to Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08224/) (2024)
- [Spatial-Functional awareness Transformer-based graph archetype contrastive learning for Decoding Visual Neural Representations from EEG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24761/) (2025)
- [Con4m: Context-aware Consistency Learning Framework for Segmented Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00041/) (2024)
- [TimeFormer: Transformer with Attention Modulation Empowered by Temporal Characteristics for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06680/) (2025)
- [Higher-order Cross-structural Embedding Model for Time Series Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22984/) (2024)
- [ERIS: An Energy-Guided Feature Disentanglement Framework for Out-of-Distribution Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14134/) (2025)
- [Seizure-NGCLNet: Representation Learning of SEEG Spatial Pathological Patterns for Epileptic Seizure Detection via Node-Graph Dual Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02028/) (2025)
- [We Need a More Robust Classifier: Dual Causal Learning Empowers Domain-Incremental Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10312/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Contrastive learning, as a self-supervised learning paradigm, becomes popular for Multivariate Time-Series (MTS) classification. It ensures the consistency across different views of unlabeled samples and then learns effective representations for these samples. Existing contrastive learning methods mainly focus on achieving temporal consistency with temporal augmentation and contrasting techniques, aiming to preserve temporal patterns against perturbations for MTS data. However, they overlook spatial consistency that requires the stability of individual sensors and their correlations. As MTS data typically originate from multiple sensors, ensuring spatial consistency becomes essential for the overall performance of contrastive learning on MTS data. Thus, we propose Graph-Aware Contrasting for spatial consistency across MTS data. Specifically, we propose graph augmentations including node and edge augmentations to preserve the stability of sensors and their correlations, followed by graph contrasting with both node- and graph-level contrasting to extract robust sensor- and global-level features. We further introduce multi-window temporal contrasting to ensure temporal consistency in the data for each sensor. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on various MTS classification tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/Frank-Wang-oss/TS-GAC.