# Representation Learning for Wearable-Based Applications in the Case of Missing Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05437 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05437/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [CSDI: Conditional Score-based Diffusion Models for Probabilistic Time Series Imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03502/) (2021)
- [SAITS: Self-Attention-based Imputation for Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08516/) (2022)
- [Set Functions for Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12064/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning for Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition: Overview, Challenges and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07416/) (2020)
- [Assessing the State of Self-Supervised Human Activity Recognition using Wearables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12938/) (2022)
- [Ensembles of Deep LSTM Learners for Activity Recognition using Wearables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09370/) (2017)
- [Beyond Just Vision: A Review on Self-Supervised Representation Learning on Multimodal and Temporal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02353/) (2022)
- [Sense and Learn: Self-Supervision for Omnipresent Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13233/) (2020)
- [CroSSL: Cross-modal Self-Supervised Learning for Time-series through Latent Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16847/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised Pretraining and Transfer Learning Enable Flu and COVID-19 Predictions in Small Mobile Sensing Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13607/) (2022)
- [Automatic Sleep Scoring from Large-scale Multi-channel Pediatric EEG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06921/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [LSM-2: Learning from Incomplete Wearable Sensor Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05321/) (2025)
- [IMTS is Worth Time × Channel Patches: Visual Masked Autoencoders for Irregular Multivariate Time Series Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22815/) (2025)
- [Beyond Least Squares: Robust Regression Transformer (R2T)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02874/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Wearable devices continuously collect sensor data and use it to infer an individual's behavior, such as sleep, physical activity, and emotions. Despite the significant interest and advancements in this field, modeling multimodal sensor data in real-world environments is still challenging due to low data quality and limited data annotations. In this work, we investigate representation learning for imputing missing wearable data and compare it with state-of-the-art statistical approaches. We investigate the performance of the transformer model on 10 physiological and behavioral signals with different masking ratios. Our results show that transformers outperform baselines for missing data imputation of signals that change more frequently, but not for monotonic signals. We further investigate the impact of imputation strategies and masking rations on downstream classification tasks. Our study provides insights for the design and development of masking-based self-supervised learning tasks and advocates the adoption of hybrid-based imputation strategies to address the challenge of missing data in wearable devices.