Score: 2

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

Published: January 12, 2026 | arXiv ID: 2601.07550v1

By: Zexi Tan , Tao Xie , Haoyi Xiao and more

Potential Business Impact:

Finds patterns in changing data better.

Business Areas:
EdTech Education, Software

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.

Repos / Data Links

Page Count
5 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Machine Learning (CS)