Contrastive Representation Learning of Longitudinal Disease Trajectories on Temporal Graphs

Abstract

Understanding disease trajectories from longitudinal clinical data remains challenging due to complex temporal dynamics and heterogeneous patient cohorts. Here, we present a contrastive representation learning framework that models multivariate disease trajectories as temporal graphs and learns representations using contrastive graph neural networks. Nodes represent patient observations over time, while edges capture temporal continuity and structural similarity between trajectories. Structure-aware random walks guide contrastive learning to generate embeddings that preserve temporal context and trajectory topology. The resulting representations enable robust clustering of patients with similar disease progression patterns and reveal latent structure in longitudinal data.