ImputeINR: Time Series Imputation via Implicit Neural Representations for Disease Diagnosis with Missing Data

ImputeINR: Time Series Imputation via Implicit Neural Representations for Disease Diagnosis with Missing Data

Mengxuan Li, Ke Liu, Jialong Guo, Jiajun Bu, Hongwei Wang, Haishuai Wang

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
AI4Tech: AI Enabling Technologies. Pages 9241-9249. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/1027

Healthcare data frequently contain a substantial proportion of missing values, necessitating effective time series imputation to support downstream disease diagnosis tasks. However, existing imputation methods focus on discrete data points and are unable to effectively model sparse data, resulting in particularly poor performance for imputing substantial missing values. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, ImputeINR, for time series imputation by employing implicit neural representations (INR) to learn continuous functions for time series. ImputeINR leverages the merits of INR in that the continuous functions are not coupled to sampling frequency and have infinite sampling frequency, allowing ImputeINR to generate fine-grained imputations even on extremely sparse observed values. Extensive experiments conducted on eight datasets with five ratios of masked values show the superior imputation performance of ImputeINR, especially for high missing ratios in time series data. We also validate that applying ImputeINR to impute missing values in healthcare data enhances the performance of downstream disease diagnosis tasks.
Keywords:
Domain-specific AI4Tech: AI4Care and AI4Health
Advanced AI4Tech: Data-driven AI4Tech