Is Precise Recovery Necessary? A Task-Oriented Imputation Approach for Time Series Forecasting on Variable Subset

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Hao, Qi, Liang, Runchang, Gao, Yue, Dong, Hao, Fan, Wei, Jiang, Lu, Wang, Pengyang
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Hao, Qi
Liang, Runchang
Gao, Yue
Dong, Hao
Fan, Wei
Jiang, Lu
Wang, Pengyang
author_facet Hao, Qi
Liang, Runchang
Gao, Yue
Dong, Hao
Fan, Wei
Jiang, Lu
Wang, Pengyang
contents Variable Subset Forecasting (VSF) refers to a unique scenario in multivariate time series forecasting, where available variables in the inference phase are only a subset of the variables in the training phase. VSF presents significant challenges as the entire time series may be missing, and neither inter- nor intra-variable correlations persist. Such conditions impede the effectiveness of traditional imputation methods, primarily focusing on filling in individual missing data points. Inspired by the principle of feature engineering that not all variables contribute positively to forecasting, we propose Task-Oriented Imputation for VSF (TOI-VSF), a novel framework shifts the focus from accurate data recovery to directly support the downstream forecasting task. TOI-VSF incorporates a self-supervised imputation module, agnostic to the forecasting model, designed to fill in missing variables while preserving the vital characteristics and temporal patterns of time series data. Additionally, we implement a joint learning strategy for imputation and forecasting, ensuring that the imputation process is directly aligned with and beneficial to the forecasting objective. Extensive experiments across four datasets demonstrate the superiority of TOI-VSF, outperforming baseline methods by $15\%$ on average.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_09928
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Is Precise Recovery Necessary? A Task-Oriented Imputation Approach for Time Series Forecasting on Variable Subset
Hao, Qi
Liang, Runchang
Gao, Yue
Dong, Hao
Fan, Wei
Jiang, Lu
Wang, Pengyang
Machine Learning
Variable Subset Forecasting (VSF) refers to a unique scenario in multivariate time series forecasting, where available variables in the inference phase are only a subset of the variables in the training phase. VSF presents significant challenges as the entire time series may be missing, and neither inter- nor intra-variable correlations persist. Such conditions impede the effectiveness of traditional imputation methods, primarily focusing on filling in individual missing data points. Inspired by the principle of feature engineering that not all variables contribute positively to forecasting, we propose Task-Oriented Imputation for VSF (TOI-VSF), a novel framework shifts the focus from accurate data recovery to directly support the downstream forecasting task. TOI-VSF incorporates a self-supervised imputation module, agnostic to the forecasting model, designed to fill in missing variables while preserving the vital characteristics and temporal patterns of time series data. Additionally, we implement a joint learning strategy for imputation and forecasting, ensuring that the imputation process is directly aligned with and beneficial to the forecasting objective. Extensive experiments across four datasets demonstrate the superiority of TOI-VSF, outperforming baseline methods by $15\%$ on average.
title Is Precise Recovery Necessary? A Task-Oriented Imputation Approach for Time Series Forecasting on Variable Subset
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09928