# TFEC: Multivariate Time-Series Clustering via Temporal-Frequency Enhanced Contrastive Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07550 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07550/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Time-Series Representation Learning via Temporal and Contextual Contrasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14112/) (2021)
- [The UEA multivariate time series classification archive, 2018](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00075/) (2018)
- [UniTS: A Unified Multi-Task Time Series Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00131/) (2024)
- [Time Series Contrastive Learning with Information-Aware Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11911/) (2023)
- [TimesURL: Self-supervised Contrastive Learning for Universal Time Series Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15709/) (2023)
- [Soft Contrastive Learning for Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16424/) (2023)
- [FOCAL: Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Time-Series Sensing Signals in Factorized Orthogonal Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20071/) (2023)
- [MHCCL: Masked Hierarchical Cluster-Wise Contrastive Learning for Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01141/) (2022)
- [Finding Order in Chaos: A Novel Data Augmentation Method for Time Series in Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13439/) (2023)
- [TimeDRL: Disentangled Representation Learning for Multivariate Time-Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04142/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Masked Time-Series Modeling via Dropping Patches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15315/) (2024)
- [TimeAutoML: Autonomous Representation Learning for Multivariate Irregularly Sampled Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01596/) (2020)
- [Fuzzy Cluster-Aware Contrastive Clustering for Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22211/) (2025)
- [Harnessing Contrastive Learning and Neural Transformation for Time Series Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07898/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multivariate Time-Series (MTS) clustering is crucial for signal processing and data analysis. Although deep learning approaches, particularly those leveraging Contrastive Learning (CL), are prominent for MTS representation, existing CL-based models face two key limitations: 1) neglecting clustering information during positive/negative sample pair construction, and 2) introducing unreasonable inductive biases, e.g., destroying time dependence and periodicity through augmentation strategies, compromising representation quality. This paper, therefore, proposes a Temporal-Frequency Enhanced Contrastive (TFEC) learning framework. To preserve temporal structure while generating low-distortion representations, a temporal-frequency Co-EnHancement (CoEH) mechanism is introduced. Accordingly, a synergistic dual-path representation and cluster distribution learning framework is designed to jointly optimize cluster structure and representation fidelity. Experiments on six real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate TFEC's superiority, achieving 4.48% average NMI gains over SOTA methods, with ablation studies validating the design. The code of the paper is available at: https://github.com/yueliangy/TFEC.