Time series signal recovery methods: comparative study

Abstract

Signal data often contains missing values. Effective replacement (imputation) of the missing values can have significant positive effects on processing the signal. In this paper, we compare three commonly employed methods for estimating missing values in time series data: forward fill, backward fill, and mean fill. We carry out a large scale experimental analysis using 3,600 AR(1)-based simulated time series to determine the optimal method for estimating missing values. The results of the numerical experiments show that the forward and backward fill methods are better suited for times series with large positive correlations, while the mean fill method is better suited for times series with low or negative correlations. The extensive and exhaustive nature of the numerical experiments provides a definitive answer to the comparison of the three imputation methods.