A convolution recurrent autoencoder for spatio-temporal missing data imputation

When sensors collect spatio-temporal data in a large geographical area, the existence of missing data cannot be escaped. Missing data negatively impacts the performance of data analysis and machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we study deep autoencoders for missing data imputation in spatio-temporal problems. We propose a convolution bidirectional-LSTM for capturing spatial and temporal patterns. Moreover, we analyze an autoencoder's latent feature representation in spatio-temporal data and illustrate its performance for missing data imputation. Traffic flow data are used for evaluation of our models. The result shows that the proposed convolution recurrent neural network outperforms state-of-the-art methods.