Feature extraction from MEG data using self-supervised learning : Investigating contrastive representation learning methods to f ind informative representations

Abstract: Modern day society is vastly complex, with information and data constantly being posted, shared, and collected everywhere. There is often an abundance of massive amounts of unlabeled data that can not be leveraged in a supervised machine learning context. Thus, there exists an incentive to research and develop machine learning methods which can learn without labels. Selfsupervised learning (SSL) is a newly emerged machine learning paradigm that aims to learn representations that can later be used in domain specific downstream tasks. In this degree project three SSL models based on the Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations (SimCLR) are evaluated. Each model aims to learn sleep deprivation related representations on magnetoencephalography (MEG) measurements. MEG is a non-invasive neuroimaging technique that is used on humans to investigate neuronal activity. The data was acquired through a collaboration with Karolinska Institutet and Stockholm University, where the SLEMEG project was conducted to study the neurophysiological response to partial sleep deprivation. The features extracted by the SSL-models are analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively, and also used to perform classification and regression tasks on subject labels. The results show that the evaluated Signal- and Recording SimCLR models can learn sleep deprivation related features, whilst simultaneously learning other co-occuring information also. Furthermore, the results indicate that the learned representations are informative and can be utilized for multiple downstream tasks. However, it is noted that what has been learned is mostly related to subject-specific individual variance, which leads to poor generalization performance on classification and regression downstream tasks. Thus, it is believed that the models would perform better with access to more MEG data, and that source localized MEG data could remove part of the individual variance that is learned.