# DBGL: Decay-aware Bipartite Graph Learning for Irregular Medical Time Series Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11842 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11842/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Neural Ordinary Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07366/) (2018)
- [Connecting the Dots: Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11650/) (2020)
- [Recurrent Neural Networks for Multivariate Time Series with Missing Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01865/) (2016)
- [Neural Controlled Differential Equations for Irregular Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08926/) (2020)
- [Scalable and accurate deep learning for electronic health records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07860/) (2018)
- [Multi-Time Attention Networks for Irregularly Sampled Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10318/) (2021)
- [Time2Vec: Learning a Vector Representation of Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05321/) (2019)
- [Set Functions for Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12064/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Interpolation-Prediction Networks for Irregularly Sampled Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07782/) (2019)
- [Time Series as Images: Vision Transformer for Irregularly Sampled Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12799/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Graph Neural Networks for Improved Electroencephalographic Seizure Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08336/) (2021)
- [ContiFormer: Continuous-Time Transformer for Irregular Time Series Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10635/) (2024)
- [Warpformer: A Multi-scale Modeling Approach for Irregular Clinical Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09368/) (2023)
- [AdaCare: Explainable Clinical Health Status Representation Learning via Scale-Adaptive Feature Extraction and Recalibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12205/) (2019)
- [A Review of Deep Learning Methods for Irregularly Sampled Medical Time Series Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12493/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Gaussian Mixture based Deep Generative Model For Robust Forecasting on Sparse Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02164/) (2021)
- [DuETT: Dual Event Time Transformer for Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13017/) (2023)
- [TimeCHEAT: A Channel Harmony Strategy for Irregularly Sampled Multivariate Time Series Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12886/) (2024)
- [MedGNN: Towards Multi-resolution Spatiotemporal Graph Learning for Medical Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04515/) (2025)
- [Modeling Irregularly Sampled Clinical Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00531/) (2018)
- [Irregularity-Informed Time Series Analysis: Adaptive Modelling of Spatial and Temporal Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12257/) (2024)
- [Explainable Spatio-Temporal GCNNs for Irregular Multivariate Time Series: Architecture and Application to ICU Patient Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01070/) (2024)
- [Integrating Sequence and Image Modeling in Irregular Medical Time Series Through Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06134/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Irregular Medical Time Series play a critical role in the clinical domain to better understand the patient's condition. However, inherent irregularity arising from heterogeneous sampling rates, asynchronous observations, and variable gaps poses key challenges for reliable modeling. Existing methods often distort temporal sampling irregularity and missingness patterns while failing to capture variable decay irregularity, resulting in suboptimal representations. To address these limitations, we introduce DBGL, Decay-Aware Bipartite Graph Learning for Irregular Medical Time Series. DBGL first introduces a patient-variable bipartite graph that simultaneously captures irregular sampling patterns without artificial alignment and adaptively models variable relationships for temporal sampling irregularity modeling, enhancing representation learning. To model variable decay irregularity, DBGL designs a novel node-specific temporal decay encoding mechanism that captures each variable's decay rates based on sampling interval, yielding a more accurate and faithful representation of irregular temporal dynamics. We evaluate the performance of DBGL on four publicly available datasets, and the results show that DBGL outperforms all baselines.