Papers › BRITS: Bidirectional Recurrent Imputation for Time Series

BRITS: Bidirectional Recurrent Imputation for Time Series

27 May 2018NeurIPS 2018 12arXiv:1805.10572archive 2025-07-28

Wei Cao, Dong Wang, Jian Li, Hao Zhou, Lei LI, Yitan Li

Time series are widely used as signals in many classification/regression tasks. It is ubiquitous that time series contains many missing values. Given multiple correlated time series data, how to fill in missing values and to predict their class labels? Existing imputation methods often impose strong assumptions of the underlying data generating process, such as linear dynamics in the state space. In this paper, we propose BRITS, a novel method based on recurrent neural networks for missing value imputation in time series data. Our proposed method directly learns the missing values in a bidirectional recurrent dynamical system, without any specific assumption. The imputed values are treated as variables of RNN graph and can be effectively updated during the backpropagation.BRITS has three advantages: (a) it can handle multiple correlated missing values in time series; (b) it generalizes to time series with nonlinear dynamics underlying; (c) it provides a data-driven imputation procedure and applies to general settings with missing data.We evaluate our model on three real-world datasets, including an air quality dataset, a health-care data, and a localization data for human activity. Experiments show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both imputation and classification/regression accuracies.

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WenjieDu/PyPOTS officialpytorch report
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flaviagiammarino/brits-tensorflow mentioned on GitHubtfMIT report

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Tasks

General ClassificationImputationMissing ValuesMultivariate Time Series ForecastingMultivariate Time Series ImputationTime SeriesTime Series AnalysisTraffic Data Imputationregression

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Multivariate Time Series Forecasting USHCN-Daily BRITS MSE 0.53 #4 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Multivariate Time Series Imputation Basketball Players Movement BRITS (SingleRes) OOB Rate (10^−3) 3.874 #2 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Multivariate Time Series Imputation Basketball Players Movement BRITS (SingleRes) Path Difference 0.571 #2 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Multivariate Time Series Imputation Basketball Players Movement BRITS (SingleRes) Path Length 0.702 #2 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Multivariate Time Series Imputation Basketball Players Movement BRITS (SingleRes) Player Distance 0.417 #2 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Multivariate Time Series Imputation Basketball Players Movement BRITS (SingleRes) Step Change (10^−3) 4.811 #2 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Multivariate Time Series Imputation Beijing Multi-Site Air-Quality Dataset BRITS MAE (PM2.5) 11.56 #2 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Multivariate Time Series Imputation PEMS-SF BRITS (SingleRes) L2 Loss (10^-4) 4.51 #2 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Multivariate Time Series Imputation PhysioNet Challenge 2012 BRITS MAE (10% of data as GT) 0.281 #2 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Multivariate Time Series Imputation UCI localization data BRITS MAE (10% missing) 0.219 #1 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Traffic Data Imputation METR-LA Point Missing BRITS MAE 2.34 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Traffic Data Imputation PEMS-BAY Point Missing BRITS MAE 1.47 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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