aiqbench analysis
RDDMPI introduces a novel residual diffusion framework that simplifies multivariate time series imputation by decomposing the signal into a deterministic baseline and stochastic residuals. This approach allows the generative model to focus specifically on structured correction terms, improving both reconstruction accuracy and uncertainty quantification in complex temporal data. The method offers a more efficient alternative to full-space diffusion models for applications like healthcare monitoring and energy systems where probabilistic imputation is critical.
RDDMPI: Residual Denoising Diffusion Model for Probabilistic Multivariate Time Series Imputation
arXiv:2609.11648v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multivariate time series imputation (MTSI) aims to recover missing values in temporal data composed of multiple interdependent variables. This problem is central to real-world applications such as healthcare monitoring, traffic networks, and energy systems. Recent diffusion-based approaches have shown strong potential for probabilistic imputation by learning to generate missing values through iterative denoising. However, most existing approaches perform diffusion directly in the original data space, requiring the denoising network to simultaneously capture global structure, temporal dynamics, and stochastic variability. This makes the generative task unnecessarily complex, especially when modern deterministic imputers can already provide accurate initial reconstructions. To address this limitation, we propose RDDMPI, a conditional residual diffusion framework that operates directly in residual space. Instead of modeling the full missing signal directly, we reformulate probabilistic imputation as a baseline-residual decomposition, where a pretrained model captures the dominant signal and a diffusion process models the residual uncertainty. To better exploit deterministic guidance, \model{} conditions the reverse denoising process on both the baseline-completed signal and its latent representation, while a reliability-aware conditioning mechanism adaptively controls the influence of baseline information during residual generation. This formulation simplifies the diffusion learning objective, enabling it to focus on structured correction terms rather than reconstructing the full signal. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that RDDMPI consistently improves both reconstruction accuracy and uncertainty quantification.
Abstract:Multivariate time series imputation (MTSI) aims to recover missing values in temporal data composed of multiple interdependent variables. This problem is central to real-world applications such as healthcare monitoring, traffic networks, and energy systems. Recent diffusion-based approaches have shown strong potential for probabilistic imputation by learning to generate missing values through iterative denoising. However, most existing approaches perform diffusion directly in the original data space, requiring the denoising network to simultaneously capture global structure, temporal dynamics, and stochastic variability. This makes the generative task unnecessarily complex, especially when modern deterministic imputers can already provide accurate initial reconstructions. To address this limitation, we propose RDDMPI, a conditional residual diffusion framework that operates directly in residual space. Instead of modeling the full missing signal directly, we reformulate probabilistic imputation as a baseline-residual decomposition, where a pretrained model captures the dominant signal and a diffusion process models the residual uncertainty. To better exploit deterministic guidance, \model{} conditions the reverse denoising process on both the baseline-completed signal and its latent representation, while a reliability-aware conditioning mechanism adaptively controls the influence of baseline information during residual generation. This formulation simplifies the diffusion learning objective, enabling it to focus on structured correction terms rather than reconstructing the full signal. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that RDDMPI consistently improves both reconstruction accuracy and uncertainty quantification.
Machine Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)
arXiv:2609.11648 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2609.11648v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.11648 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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