Imputation of Missing SST Observation Data Using Multivariate Bidirectional RNN

Abstract

The data of the missing section among the vertex surface sea temperature observation data was imputed using the Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Network(BiRNN). Among artificial intelligence techniques, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), which are commonly used for time series data, only estimate in the direction of time flow or in the reverse direction to the missing estimation position, so the estimation performance is poor in the long-term missing section. On the other hand, in this study, estimation performance can be improved even for long-term missing data by estimating in both directions before and after the missing section. Also, by using all available data around the observation point (sea surface temperature, temperature, wind field, atmospheric pressure, humidity), the imputation performance was further improved by estimating the imputation data from these correlations together. For performance verification, a statistical model, Multivariate Imputation by Chained Equations (MICE), a machine learning-based Random Forest model, and an RNN model using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) were compared. For imputation of long-term missing for 7 days, the average accuracy of the BiRNN/ statistical models is 70.8%/61.2%, respectively, and the average error is 0.28 degrees/0.44 degrees, respectively, so the BiRNN model performs better than other models. By applying a temporal decay factor representing the missing pattern, it is judged that the BiRNN technique has better imputation performance than the existing method as the missing section becomes longer.