Tripletformer for Probabilistic Interpolation of Asynchronous Time Series

Asynchronous time series are often observed in several applications such as health care, astronomy, and climate science, and pose a significant challenge to the standard deep learning architectures. Interpolation of asynchronous time series is vital for many real-world tasks like root cause analysis, and medical diagnosis. In this paper, we propose a novel encoder-decoder architecture called Tripletformer, which works on the set of observations where each set element is a triple of time, channel, and value, for the probabilistic interpolation of the asynchronous time series. Both the encoder and the decoder of the Tripletformer are modeled using attention layers and fully connected layers and are invariant to the order in which set elements are presented. The proposed Tripletformer is compared with a range of baselines over multiple real-world and synthetic asynchronous time series datasets, and the experimental results attest that it produces more accurate and certain interpolations. We observe an improvement in negative loglikelihood error up to 33% over real and 800% over synthetic asynchronous time series datasets compared to the state-of-the-art model using the Tripletformer.