BRNN-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks with Bi-directional Recurrent Neural Networks for Multivariate Time Series Imputation

Abstract

Missing values appearing in multivariate time series often prevent further and in-depth analysis in real-world applications. To handle those missing values, advanced multivariate time series imputation methods are expected to (1) consider bi-directional temporal correlations, (2) model cross-variable correlations, and (3) approximate original data's distribution. However, most of existing approaches are not able to meet all the three above-mentioned requirements. Drawing on advances in machine learning, we propose BRNN-GAN, a generative adversarial network with bi-directional RNN cells. The BRNN cell is designed to model bi-directional temporal and cross-variable correlations, and the GAN architecture is employed to learn original data's distribution. By conducting comprehensive experiments on two public datasets, the experimental results show that our proposed BRNN-GAN outperforms all the baselines in terms of achieving the lowest Mean Absolute Error (MAE).