Glocal Information Bottleneck for Time Series Imputation

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Yang, Jie, Zhang, Kexin, Zhang, Guibin, Yu, Philip S., Ding, Kaize
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Yang, Jie
Zhang, Kexin
Zhang, Guibin
Yu, Philip S.
Ding, Kaize
author_facet Yang, Jie
Zhang, Kexin
Zhang, Guibin
Yu, Philip S.
Ding, Kaize
contents Time Series Imputation (TSI), which aims to recover missing values in temporal data, remains a fundamental challenge due to the complex and often high-rate missingness in real-world scenarios. Existing models typically optimize the point-wise reconstruction loss, focusing on recovering numerical values (local information). However, we observe that under high missing rates, these models still perform well in the training phase yet produce poor imputations and distorted latent representation distributions (global information) in the inference phase. This reveals a critical optimization dilemma: current objectives lack global guidance, leading models to overfit local noise and fail to capture global information of the data. To address this issue, we propose a new training paradigm, Glocal Information Bottleneck (Glocal-IB). Glocal-IB is model-agnostic and extends the standard IB framework by introducing a Global Alignment loss, derived from a tractable mutual information approximation. This loss aligns the latent representations of masked inputs with those of their originally observed counterparts. It helps the model retain global structure and local details while suppressing noise caused by missing values, giving rise to better generalization under high missingness. Extensive experiments on nine datasets confirm that Glocal-IB leads to consistently improved performance and aligned latent representations under missingness. Our code implementation is available in https://github.com/Muyiiiii/NeurIPS-25-Glocal-IB.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_04910
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Glocal Information Bottleneck for Time Series Imputation
Yang, Jie
Zhang, Kexin
Zhang, Guibin
Yu, Philip S.
Ding, Kaize
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Time Series Imputation (TSI), which aims to recover missing values in temporal data, remains a fundamental challenge due to the complex and often high-rate missingness in real-world scenarios. Existing models typically optimize the point-wise reconstruction loss, focusing on recovering numerical values (local information). However, we observe that under high missing rates, these models still perform well in the training phase yet produce poor imputations and distorted latent representation distributions (global information) in the inference phase. This reveals a critical optimization dilemma: current objectives lack global guidance, leading models to overfit local noise and fail to capture global information of the data. To address this issue, we propose a new training paradigm, Glocal Information Bottleneck (Glocal-IB). Glocal-IB is model-agnostic and extends the standard IB framework by introducing a Global Alignment loss, derived from a tractable mutual information approximation. This loss aligns the latent representations of masked inputs with those of their originally observed counterparts. It helps the model retain global structure and local details while suppressing noise caused by missing values, giving rise to better generalization under high missingness. Extensive experiments on nine datasets confirm that Glocal-IB leads to consistently improved performance and aligned latent representations under missingness. Our code implementation is available in https://github.com/Muyiiiii/NeurIPS-25-Glocal-IB.
title Glocal Information Bottleneck for Time Series Imputation
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04910