Role Hypergraph Contrastive Learning for Multivariate Time-Series Analysis

Multivariate Time-Series (MTS) analysis is crucial across various domains. Considering the spatial and temporal consistency of MTS, existing methods leverage graph structures with temporal augmentation and contrastive learning to achieve robust learning of spatial dependencies and temporal patterns. Given the inherent high-order correlations in MTS, hypergraphs present a promising approach. However, two key challenges limit their further development: 1) Feature-based perspectives capture limited spatial information, while structural perspectives encode richer spatial consistency and evolution dependency; 2) Various semantic patterns (e.g., synergy, inhibition) entangle in sensor correlations, leading to semantic ambiguity. The underlying reason is that conventional hypergraph structures cannot distinguish specific semantic roles within or across hyperedges. Thus, we propose Role Hypergraph Contrastive Learning for MTS analysis. Specifically, we introduce the concept of role to generalize hypergraphs to Role Hypergraphs, enabling precise modeling of sensor correlations by assigning each vertex-hyperedge pair with a semantic role. Building on this structure, we design a role hypergraph contrastive learning paradigm to comprehensively capture the spatial and temporal dependencies: From a structural perspective, role hypergraph structural contrasting captures spatial short-term consistency and long-term evolution; from a feature perspective, alignment of complementary role information ensures sensor-level temporal consistency. Experiments on classification and forecasting tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and interpretability of our method.