Papers › Multivariate Time Series Imputation with Generative Adversarial Networks

Multivariate Time Series Imputation with Generative Adversarial Networks

1 Dec 2018NeurIPS 2018 12archive 2025-07-28

Yonghong Luo, Xiangrui Cai, Ying Zhang, Jun Xu, Yuan Xiaojie

Multivariate time series usually contain a large number of missing values, which hinders the application of advanced analysis methods on multivariate time series data. Conventional approaches to addressing the challenge of missing values, including mean/zero imputation, case deletion, and matrix factorization-based imputation, are all incapable of modeling the temporal dependencies and the nature of complex distribution in multivariate time series. In this paper, we treat the problem of missing value imputation as data generation. Inspired by the success of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) in image generation, we propose to learn the overall distribution of a multivariate time series dataset with GAN, which is further used to generate the missing values for each sample. Different from the image data, the time series data are usually incomplete due to the nature of data recording process. A modified Gate Recurrent Unit is employed in GAN to model the temporal irregularity of the incomplete time series. Experiments on two multivariate time series datasets show that the proposed model outperformed the baselines in terms of accuracy of imputation. Experimental results also showed that a simple model on the imputed data can achieve state-of-the-art results on the prediction tasks, demonstrating the benefits of our model in downstream applications.

PaperPDF

Code

No code repository is listed for this paper in the archive or in Syntology's graph.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Image GenerationImputationMissing ValuesMultivariate Time Series ImputationTime SeriesTime Series Analysis

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Multivariate Time Series Imputation Basketball Players Movement GRUI OOB Rate (10^−3) 4.703 #5 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Multivariate Time Series Imputation Basketball Players Movement GRUI Path Difference 0.690 #5 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Multivariate Time Series Imputation Basketball Players Movement GRUI Path Length 1.141 #5 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Multivariate Time Series Imputation Basketball Players Movement GRUI Player Distance 0.398 #5 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Multivariate Time Series Imputation Basketball Players Movement GRUI Step Change (10^−3) 14.95 #5 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Multivariate Time Series Imputation KDD CUP Challenge 2018 GAN-2-stage MSE (10% missing) 0.355 #2 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Multivariate Time Series Imputation PEMS-SF GRUI L2 Loss (10^-4) 15.24 #5 of 5 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.

Methods

Convolution

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections