Imputation with Inter-Series Information from Prototypes for Irregular Sampled Time Series
This addresses a common challenge in time series analysis for domains like healthcare or finance, offering a novel approach that reduces uncertainty and memorization effects.
The paper tackles the problem of imputing missing values in irregularly sampled time series by integrating inter-series information, achieving up to a 26% relative improvement in mean square error over state-of-the-art models.
Irregularly sampled time series are ubiquitous, presenting significant challenges for analysis due to missing values. Despite existing methods address imputation, they predominantly focus on leveraging intra-series information, neglecting the potential benefits that inter-series information could provide, such as reducing uncertainty and memorization effect. To bridge this gap, we propose PRIME, a Prototype Recurrent Imputation ModEl, which integrates both intra-series and inter-series information for imputing missing values in irregularly sampled time series. Our framework comprises a prototype memory module for learning inter-series information, a bidirectional gated recurrent unit utilizing prototype information for imputation, and an attentive prototypical refinement module for adjusting imputations. We conducted extensive experiments on three datasets, and the results underscore PRIME's superiority over the state-of-the-art models by up to 26% relative improvement on mean square error.