A Causal Convolutional Low-rank Representation Model for Imputation of Water Quality Data

The monitoring of water quality is a crucial part of environmental protection, and a large number of monitors are widely deployed to monitor water quality. Due to unavoidable factors such as data acquisition breakdowns, sensors and communication failures, water quality monitoring data suffers from missing values over time, resulting in High-Dimensional and Sparse (HDS) Water Quality Data (WQD). The simple and rough filling of the missing values leads to inaccurate results and affects the implementation of relevant measures. Therefore, this paper proposes a Causal convolutional Low-rank Representation (CLR) model for imputing missing WQD to improve the completeness of the WQD, which employs a two-fold idea: a) applying causal convolutional operation to consider the temporal dependence of the low-rank representation, thus incorporating temporal information to improve the imputation accuracy; and b) implementing a hyperparameters adaptation scheme to automatically adjust the best hyperparameters during model training, thereby reducing the tedious manual adjustment of hyper-parameters. Experimental studies on three real-world water quality datasets demonstrate that the proposed CLR model is superior to some of the existing state-of-the-art imputation models in terms of imputation accuracy and time cost, as well as indicating that the proposed model provides more reliable decision support for environmental monitoring.