Analysis of Augmentations for Contrastive ECG Representation Learning

This paper systematically investigates the effectiveness of various augmentations for contrastive self-supervised learning of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals and identifies the best parameters. The baseline of our proposed self-supervised framework consists of two main parts: the contrastive learning and the downstream task. In the first stage, we train an encoder using a number of augmentations to extract generalizable ECG signal representations. We then freeze the encoder and finetune a few linear layers with different amounts of labelled data for downstream arrhythmia detection. We then experiment with various augmentations techniques and explore a range of parameters. Our experiments are done on PTB-XL, a large and publicly available 12-lead ECG dataset. The results show that applying augmentations in a specific range of complexities works better for self-supervised contrastive learning. For instance, when adding Gaussian noise, a sigma in the range of 0.1 to 0.2 achieves better results, while poor training occurs when the added noise is too small or too large (outside of the specified range). A similar trend is observed with other augmentations, demonstrating the importance of selecting the optimum level of difficulty for the added augmentations, as augmentations that are too simple will not result in effective training, while augmentations that are too difficult will also prevent the model from effective learning of generalized representations. Our work can influence future research on self-supervised contrastive learning on biosignals and aid in selecting optimum parameters for different augmentations.