# STING: Self-attention based Time-series Imputation Networks using GAN

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.10801 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10801/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Convolutional LSTM Network: A Machine Learning Approach for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04214/) (2015)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [Wasserstein GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.07875/) (2017)
- [Recurrent Neural Networks for Multivariate Time Series with Missing Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01865/) (2016)
- [GAIN: Missing Data Imputation using Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02920/) (2018)
- [Deep Spatio-Temporal Residual Networks for Citywide Crowd Flows Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.00081/) (2016)
- [BRITS: Bidirectional Recurrent Imputation for Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10572/) (2018)
- [Image Captioning with Semantic Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.03925/) (2016)
- [Semantic Image Inpainting with Deep Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.07539/) (2016)
- [MIDA: Multiple Imputation using Denoising Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02737/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [zGAN: An Outlier-focused Generative Adversarial Network For Realistic Synthetic Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20808/) (2024)
- [Contrastive Learning-based Imputation-Prediction Networks for In-hospital Mortality Risk Modeling using EHRs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09896/) (2023)
- [CINDI: Conditional Imputation and Noisy Data Integrity with Flows in Power Grid Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11745/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Time series data are ubiquitous in real-world applications. However, one of the most common problems is that the time series data could have missing values by the inherent nature of the data collection process. So imputing missing values from multivariate (correlated) time series data is imperative to improve a prediction performance while making an accurate data-driven decision. Conventional works for imputation simply delete missing values or fill them based on mean/zero. Although recent works based on deep neural networks have shown remarkable results, they still have a limitation to capture the complex generation process of the multivariate time series. In this paper, we propose a novel imputation method for multivariate time series data, called STING (Self-attention based Time-series Imputation Networks using GAN). We take advantage of generative adversarial networks and bidirectional recurrent neural networks to learn latent representations of the time series. In addition, we introduce a novel attention mechanism to capture the weighted correlations of the whole sequence and avoid potential bias brought by unrelated ones. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that STING outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of imputation accuracy as well as downstream tasks with the imputed values therein.