SL-S4Wave: Self-Supervised Learning of Physiological Waveforms with Structured State Space Models

Modeling long-sequence medical time series data, such as electrocardiograms (ECG), poses significant challenges due to high sampling rates, multichannel signal complexity, inherent noise, and limited labeled data. While recent self-supervised learning (SSL) methods, based on various encoder architectures such as convolutional neural networks, have been proposed to learn representations from unlabeled data, they often fall short in capturing long-range dependencies and noise-invariant features. Structured state space models (S4) excel at long-sequence modeling, but existing S4 architectures fail to capture the unique characteristics of multichannel physiological waveforms. In this work, we propose SL-S4Wave, a self-supervised learning framework that combines contrastive learning with a tailored encoder built on structured state space models. The encoder incorporates multi-layer global convolution using multiscale subkernels, enabling the capture of both fine-grained local patterns and long-range temporal dependencies in noisy, high-resolution multichannel waveforms. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that SL-S4Wave (1) consistently outperforms state-of-the-art supervised and self-supervised baselines in a challenging arrhythmia detection task, (2) achieves high performance with significantly fewer labeled examples, showcasing strong label efficiency, and (3) maintains robust performance on long waveform segments, highlighting its capacity to model complex temporal dynamics in long sequences that most existing approaches fail to efficiently model, and (4) transfers effectively to unseen arrhythmia types, underscoring its robust cross-domain generalization. We additionally evaluate SL-S4Wave on multiple EEG tasks, achieving superior performance over strong baselines, demonstrating generalizability of our approach beyond cardiac waveforms.

Treatment-RSPN: Recurrent Sum-Product Networks for Sequential Treatment Regimes

Sum-product networks (SPNs) have recently emerged as a novel deep learning architecture enabling highly efficient probabilistic inference. Since their introduction, SPNs have been applied to a wide range of data modalities and extended to time-sequence data. In this paper, we propose a general framework for modelling sequential treatment decision-making behaviour and treatment response using recurrent sum-product networks (RSPNs). Models developed using our framework benefit from the full range of RSPN capabilities, including the abilities to model the full distribution of the data, to seamlessly handle latent variables, missing values and categorical data, and to efficiently perform marginal and conditional inference. Our methodology is complemented by a novel variant of the expectation-maximization algorithm for RSPNs, enabling efficient training of our models. We evaluate our approach on a synthetic dataset as well as real-world data from the MIMIC-IV intensive care unit medical database. Our evaluation demonstrates that our approach can closely match the ground-truth data generation process on synthetic data and achieve results close to neural and probabilistic baselines while using a tractable and interpretable model.