# Spatiotemporal Transformer for Imputing Sparse Data: A Deep Learning Approach

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.00963 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00963/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [CSDI: Conditional Score-based Diffusion Models for Probabilistic Time Series Imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03502/) (2021)
- [BRITS: Bidirectional Recurrent Imputation for Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10572/) (2018)
- [GP-VAE: Deep Probabilistic Time Series Imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04155/) (2019)
- [SAITS: Self-Attention-based Imputation for Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08516/) (2022)
- [Deep Kalman Filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05121/) (2015)
- [Filling the G_ap_s: Multivariate Time Series Imputation by Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00298/) (2021)
- [Long-Term Missing Value Imputation for Time Series Data Using Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12441/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Effective management of environmental resources and agricultural sustainability heavily depends on accurate soil moisture data. However, datasets like the SMAP/Sentinel-1 soil moisture product often contain missing values across their spatiotemporal grid, which poses a significant challenge. This paper introduces a novel Spatiotemporal Transformer model (ST-Transformer) specifically designed to address the issue of missing values in sparse spatiotemporal datasets, particularly focusing on soil moisture data. The ST-Transformer employs multiple spatiotemporal attention layers to capture the complex spatiotemporal correlations in the data and can integrate additional spatiotemporal covariates during the imputation process, thereby enhancing its accuracy. The model is trained using a self-supervised approach, enabling it to autonomously predict missing values from observed data points. Our model's efficacy is demonstrated through its application to the SMAP 1km soil moisture data over a 36 x 36 km grid in Texas. It showcases superior accuracy compared to well-known imputation methods. Additionally, our simulation studies on other datasets highlight the model's broader applicability in various spatiotemporal imputation tasks.