Attention-based generative adversarial networks for aquaponics environment time series data imputation

Environmental parameter data collected by sensors for monitoring the environment of agricultural facility operations are usually incomplete due to external environmental disturbances and device failures. And the missing of collected data is completely at random. In practice, missing data could create biased estimations and make multivariate time series predictions of environmental parameters difficult, leading to imprecise environmental control. A multivariate time series imputation model based on generative adversarial networks and multi-head attention (ATTN-GAN) is proposed in this work to reducing the negative consequence of missing data. ATTN-GAN can capture the temporal and spatial correlation of time series, and has a good capacity to learn data distribution. In the downstream experiments, we used ATTN-GAN and baseline models for data imputation, and predicted the imputed data, respectively. For the imputation of missing data, over the 20%, 50% and 80% missing rate, ATTN-GAN had the lowest RMSE, 0.1593, 0.2012 and 0.2688 respectively. For water temperature prediction, data processed with ATTN-GAN over MLP, LSTM, DA-RNN prediction methods had the lowest MSE, 0.6816, 0.8375 and 0.3736 respectively. Those results revealed that ATTN-GAN outperformed all baseline models in terms of data imputation accuracy. The data processed by ATTN-GAN is the best for time series prediction.