Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Simon, Louis, Chetouani, Mohamed
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01569
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911132982181888
author Simon, Louis
Chetouani, Mohamed
author_facet Simon, Louis
Chetouani, Mohamed
contents The widespread adoption of mobile and wearable sensing technologies has enabled continuous and personalized monitoring of affect, mood disorders, and stress. When combined with ecological self-report questionnaires, these systems offer a powerful opportunity to explore longitudinal modeling of human behaviors. However, challenges arise from missing data and the irregular timing of self-reports, which make challenging the prediction of human states and behaviors. In this study, we investigate the use of time embeddings to capture time dependencies within sequences of Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMA). We introduce a novel time embedding method, Ema2Vec, designed to effectively handle irregularly spaced self-reports, and evaluate it on a new task of longitudinal stress prediction. Our method outperforms standard stress prediction baselines that rely on fixed-size daily windows, as well as models trained directly on longitudinal sequences without time-aware representations. These findings emphasize the importance of incorporating time embeddings when modeling irregularly sampled longitudinal data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_01569
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Longitudinal Stress Dynamics from Irregular Self-Reports via Time Embeddings
Simon, Louis
Chetouani, Mohamed
Machine Learning
The widespread adoption of mobile and wearable sensing technologies has enabled continuous and personalized monitoring of affect, mood disorders, and stress. When combined with ecological self-report questionnaires, these systems offer a powerful opportunity to explore longitudinal modeling of human behaviors. However, challenges arise from missing data and the irregular timing of self-reports, which make challenging the prediction of human states and behaviors. In this study, we investigate the use of time embeddings to capture time dependencies within sequences of Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMA). We introduce a novel time embedding method, Ema2Vec, designed to effectively handle irregularly spaced self-reports, and evaluate it on a new task of longitudinal stress prediction. Our method outperforms standard stress prediction baselines that rely on fixed-size daily windows, as well as models trained directly on longitudinal sequences without time-aware representations. These findings emphasize the importance of incorporating time embeddings when modeling irregularly sampled longitudinal data.
title Learning Longitudinal Stress Dynamics from Irregular Self-Reports via Time Embeddings
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01569