A sequential artifıcial neural network approach for imputation of right-censored time series data
Abstract
Modelling time series data subject to irregularities, particularly right-censoring due to detection limits, poses significant statistical challenges. Traditional approaches often yield biased estimates or rely on strict distributional assumptions that rarely hold in real-world applications. In this study, a distribution-free imputation method based on Artificial Neural Networks is proposed to handle auto-correlated right-censored data and is compared with the established Gaussian Imputation technique, as well as k-nearest neighbors and random forest imputation. A comprehensive simulation study was conducted to evaluate the performance of all four methods under varying censoring levels (5%, 25%, and 50%) and two sample sizes, using root mean squared error, mean absolute error, and bias as performance metrics. The results demonstrate that while the methods perform comparably at low censoring levels, the proposed method based on artificial neural networks attains the lowest error and the smallest bias as the censoring rate increases, significantly outperforming the k-nearest neighbors and random forest benchmarks and improving on the Gaussian Imputation technique overall. These findings are confirmed by a pairwise Wilcoxon signed-rank test and by a real-data application to a heavily censored cloud-ceiling time series, in which the proposed method again achieves the best accuracy. By learning the underlying non-linear patterns directly from the data without manipulating the observed components, the proposed approach offers a robust and accurate alternative for completing right-censored time series datasets.
Keywords
References
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Details
Primary Language
English
Subjects
Biostatistics, Soft Computing, Statistical Theory
Journal Section
Research Article
Publication Date
July 20, 2026
Submission Date
December 23, 2025
Acceptance Date
July 20, 2026
Published in Issue
Year 2026 Number: 2026