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Life sciences · Preprint
arXiv · October 26, 2026
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Cross-dataset generalisation remains a major challenge for automated electrocardiogram (ECG) arrhythmia classification because of differences in patient populations, acquisition protocols, annotation practices, and class distributions. Learning representations that remain informative across independent datasets could reduce reliance on dataset-specific labelled data. We propose TransECG-SSL, a self-supervised framework for transferable heartbeat representation learning from unlabelled ECG data. A Transformer encoder is pretrained using a hybrid objective combining masked signal reconstruction and contrastive learning, then frozen and evaluated by linear probing under patient-disjoint evaluation. Experiments across three public ECG databases and seven source--target settings show that Hybrid SSL consistently outperforms randomly initialised Transformers and achieves higher balanced accuracy than architecture-matched source-supervised pretraining. Reconstruction-only SSL remains competitive with Hybrid SSL, whereas contrastive-only pretraining performs substantially worse, highlighting the importance of masked reconstruction for transferability. Cross-dataset transfer nevertheless reduces balanced accuracy relative to target-specific self-supervised pretraining, while minority arrhythmia classes remain challenging under severe class imbalance. These findings demonstrate the potential of label-efficient self-supervised learning for cross-dataset ECG representation transfer while highlighting persistent limitations from domain shift and class imbalance.