Learning ECG Representations via Poly-Window Contrastive Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Yuan, Yi, Van Duyn, Joseph, Yan, Runze, Huang, Zhuoyi, Vesal, Sulaiman, Plis, Sergey, Hu, Xiao, Kwak, Gloria Hyunjung, Xiao, Ran, Fedorov, Alex
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Yuan, Yi
Van Duyn, Joseph
Yan, Runze
Huang, Zhuoyi
Vesal, Sulaiman
Plis, Sergey
Hu, Xiao
Kwak, Gloria Hyunjung
Xiao, Ran
Fedorov, Alex
author_facet Yuan, Yi
Van Duyn, Joseph
Yan, Runze
Huang, Zhuoyi
Vesal, Sulaiman
Plis, Sergey
Hu, Xiao
Kwak, Gloria Hyunjung
Xiao, Ran
Fedorov, Alex
contents Electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis is foundational for cardiovascular disease diagnosis, yet the performance of deep learning models is often constrained by limited access to annotated data. Self-supervised contrastive learning has emerged as a powerful approach for learning robust ECG representations from unlabeled signals. However, most existing methods generate only pairwise augmented views and fail to leverage the rich temporal structure of ECG recordings. In this work, we present a poly-window contrastive learning framework. We extract multiple temporal windows from each ECG instance to construct positive pairs and maximize their agreement via statistics. Inspired by the principle of slow feature analysis, our approach explicitly encourages the model to learn temporally invariant and physiologically meaningful features that persist across time. We validate our approach through extensive experiments and ablation studies on the PTB-XL dataset. Our results demonstrate that poly-window contrastive learning consistently outperforms conventional two-view methods in multi-label superclass classification, achieving higher AUROC (0.891 vs. 0.888) and F1 scores (0.680 vs. 0.679) while requiring up to four times fewer pre-training epochs (32 vs. 128) and 14.8% in total wall clock pre-training time reduction. Despite processing multiple windows per sample, we achieve a significant reduction in the number of training epochs and total computation time, making our method practical for training foundational models. Through extensive ablations, we identify optimal design choices and demonstrate robustness across various hyperparameters. These findings establish poly-window contrastive learning as a highly efficient and scalable paradigm for automated ECG analysis and provide a promising general framework for self-supervised representation learning in biomedical time-series data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_15225
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning ECG Representations via Poly-Window Contrastive Learning
Yuan, Yi
Van Duyn, Joseph
Yan, Runze
Huang, Zhuoyi
Vesal, Sulaiman
Plis, Sergey
Hu, Xiao
Kwak, Gloria Hyunjung
Xiao, Ran
Fedorov, Alex
Machine Learning
Signal Processing
Electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis is foundational for cardiovascular disease diagnosis, yet the performance of deep learning models is often constrained by limited access to annotated data. Self-supervised contrastive learning has emerged as a powerful approach for learning robust ECG representations from unlabeled signals. However, most existing methods generate only pairwise augmented views and fail to leverage the rich temporal structure of ECG recordings. In this work, we present a poly-window contrastive learning framework. We extract multiple temporal windows from each ECG instance to construct positive pairs and maximize their agreement via statistics. Inspired by the principle of slow feature analysis, our approach explicitly encourages the model to learn temporally invariant and physiologically meaningful features that persist across time. We validate our approach through extensive experiments and ablation studies on the PTB-XL dataset. Our results demonstrate that poly-window contrastive learning consistently outperforms conventional two-view methods in multi-label superclass classification, achieving higher AUROC (0.891 vs. 0.888) and F1 scores (0.680 vs. 0.679) while requiring up to four times fewer pre-training epochs (32 vs. 128) and 14.8% in total wall clock pre-training time reduction. Despite processing multiple windows per sample, we achieve a significant reduction in the number of training epochs and total computation time, making our method practical for training foundational models. Through extensive ablations, we identify optimal design choices and demonstrate robustness across various hyperparameters. These findings establish poly-window contrastive learning as a highly efficient and scalable paradigm for automated ECG analysis and provide a promising general framework for self-supervised representation learning in biomedical time-series data.
title Learning ECG Representations via Poly-Window Contrastive Learning
topic Machine Learning
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15225