Are Time-Indexed Foundation Models the Future of Time Series Imputation?

Foundation models for time series imputation remain largely unexplored. Recently, two such models, TabPFN-TS and MoTM, have emerged. These models share a common philosophy that places them within the family of time-indexed foundation models. This paper presents the first large-scale empirical study of these models for zero-shot imputation, which enables missing value recovery without retraining across a wide range of scenarios. We conduct extensive univariate experiments across 33 out-of-domain datasets (approximately 1.3M imputation windows) and evaluate their ability to integrate covariates at inference time to improve accuracy without fine-tuning. Our results demonstrate that time-indexed foundation models are a powerful and practical step toward achieving general-purpose, zero-shot imputation for real-world time series.

MoTM: Towards a Foundation Model for Time Series Imputation based on Continuous Modeling

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest for time series foundation models, with a strong emphasis on the forecasting task. Yet, the crucial task of out-of-domain imputation of missing values remains largely underexplored. We propose a first step to fill this gap by leveraging implicit neural representations (INRs). INRs model time series as continuous functions and naturally handle various missing data scenarios and sampling rates. While they have shown strong performance within specific distributions, they struggle under distribution shifts. To address this, we introduce MoTM (Mixture of Timeflow Models), a step toward a foundation model for time series imputation. Building on the idea that a new time series is a mixture of previously seen patterns, MoTM combines a basis of INRs, each trained independently on a distinct family of time series, with a ridge regressor that adapts to the observed context at inference. We demonstrate robust in-domain and out-of-domain generalization across diverse imputation scenarios (e.g., block and pointwise missingness, variable sampling rates), paving the way for adaptable foundation imputation models.

A synthetic dataset of French electric load curves with temperature conditioning

The undergoing energy transition is causing behavioral changes in electricity use, e.g. with self-consumption of local generation, or flexibility services for demand control. To better understand these changes and the challenges they induce, accessing individual smart meter data is crucial. Yet this is personal data under the European GDPR. A widespread use of such data requires thus to create synthetic realistic and privacy-preserving samples. This paper introduces a new synthetic load curve dataset generated by conditional latent diffusion. We also provide the contracted power, time-of-use plan and local temperature used for generation. Fidelity, utility and privacy of the dataset are thoroughly evaluated, demonstrating its good quality and thereby supporting its interest for energy modeling applications.

Interpretable time series neural representation for classification purposes

Deep learning has made significant advances in creating efficient representations of time series data by automatically identifying complex patterns. However, these approaches lack interpretability, as the time series is transformed into a latent vector that is not easily interpretable. On the other hand, Symbolic Aggregate approximation (SAX) methods allow the creation of symbolic representations that can be interpreted but do not capture complex patterns effectively. In this work, we propose a set of requirements for a neural representation of univariate time series to be interpretable. We propose a new unsupervised neural architecture that meets these requirements. The proposed model produces consistent, discrete, interpretable, and visualizable representations. The model is learned independently of any downstream tasks in an unsupervised setting to ensure robustness. As a demonstration of the effectiveness of the proposed model, we propose experiments on classification tasks using UCR archive datasets. The obtained results are extensively compared to other interpretable models and state-of-the-art neural representation learning models. The experiments show that the proposed model yields, on average better results than other interpretable approaches on multiple datasets. We also present qualitative experiments to asses the interpretability of the approach.

Time Series Continuous Modeling for Imputation and Forecasting with Implicit Neural Representations

Although widely explored, time series modeling continues to encounter significant challenges when confronted with real-world data. We propose a novel modeling approach leveraging Implicit Neural Representations (INR). This approach enables us to effectively capture the continuous aspect of time series and provides a natural solution to recurring modeling issues such as handling missing data, dealing with irregular sampling, or unaligned observations from multiple sensors. By introducing conditional modulation of INR parameters and leveraging meta-learning techniques, we address the issue of generalization to both unseen samples and time window shifts. Through extensive experimentation, our model demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in forecasting and imputation tasks, while exhibiting flexibility in handling a wide range of challenging scenarios that competing models cannot.