General Incomplete Time Series Analysis via Patch Dropping Without Imputation

Abstract

Missing values in multivariate time series data present significant challenges to effective analysis. Existing methods for multivariate time series analysis either ignore missing data, sacrificing performance, or follow the impute-then-analyze paradigm, which suffers from redundant training and error accumulation, leading to biased results and suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose INTER, a novel end-to-end framework for incomplete multivariate time series analysis, which bypasses imputation by leveraging pre-trained language models to learn the distribution of incomplete time series data. INTER incorporates two novel components: the missing-rate-aware time series patch-dropping (MPD) strategy and the missing-aware Transformer block, both of which we propose to enhance model generalization, robustness, and the ability to capture underlying patterns in the observed incomplete time series. Moreover, we theoretically prove that the MPD strategy exhibits lower sample variance for time series with the same dropout rate compared to other dropping strategies. Extensive experiments on 11 public real-world time series datasets demonstrate that INTER improves accuracy by over 20% compared to state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining competitive computational efficiency.