The paper introduces an assumption‑lean framework that uses AI‑generated measurements as weak shadow variables to identify and infer population quantities when data are missing not at random. Weak shadow variables are outcome‑informative proxies that are conditionally independent of missingness given the true outcome and covariates, and they do not need to predict missing outcomes accurately. The authors derive sharp bounds via linear programs and propose a localized penalized estimator with a subsampling algorithm for confidence intervals, demonstrating in semi‑synthetic experiments that the resulting intervals are substantially narrower and more accurate than classical MNAR methods.
By Hongyu Chen, David Simchi-Levi, Ruoxuan Xiong
arXiv:2609.37632v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Time series imputation has progressed from statistical and deep learning approaches to diffusion-based models, which have shown strong recent perform...
By Fariza Rashid, Duc Van Le, Rahat Masood, Gustavo Batista, Aruna Seneviratne, Suranga Seneviratne
arXiv:2606. 05878v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Foundation models mark a profound paradigm shift in time series modeling, with task-specific models being superseded by general-purpose zero-shot models.
By Etienne Le Naour, Tahar Nabil, Adrien Petralia
arXiv:2607. 07767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Missing values undermine statistical inference and machine learning pipelines, yet most imputation methods rely on heuristics or restrictive parametric assumptions that ignore the joint data distribution.
By Andrea Basteri, Carlo Ciliberto, Alessandro Rudi
arXiv:2602. 16061v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Estimating population quantities such as mean outcomes from user feedback is fundamental to platform evaluation and social science, yet feedback is often missing not at random (MNAR): users with stronger opinions are more likely to respond, so standard estimators are biased and the estimand is not identified without additional assumptions.
By Hongyu Chen, David Simchi-Levi, Ruoxuan Xiong
arXiv:2606. 05073v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Missing value imputation is a fundamental task in machine learning, with most existing methods assuming that all missing entries correspond to unobserved regular values.
By Lixing Zhang, Yidong Ouyang, Weifu Li, Shixiang Zhu, Guang Cheng, Liyan Xie
The paper introduces a pre‑training pipeline that creates transformer‑based imputation specialists for tabular data with specific missingness patterns. By featurizing entries, generating synthetic data with configurable missingness modules, and fitting on millions of synthetic tables, the pipeline produces pattern‑specific models that outperform dedicated methods for each missingness pattern. A default model trained only on MCAR data, TabImpute, remains robust across all tested patterns, and the authors release the pipeline, models, and a new benchmark of 42 datasets and 11 missingness patterns.
By Jacob Feitelberg, Dwaipayan Saha, Kyuseong Choi, Zaid Ahmad, Anish Agarwal, Raaz Dwivedi
arXiv:2607. 28698v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Flow matching assumes fully observed training data, which many real-world applications rarely provide.
By Fairoz Nower Khan, Nabuat Zaman Nahim, Peizhong Ju
Missing value imputation is a fundamental task in machine learning, with most existing methods assuming that all missing entries correspond to unobserved regular values. In many real-world datasets, however, missingness may arise from two distinct sources: some entries are meaningfully missing (intrinsically absent and semantically valid), while others are missing due to the observation process and should be imputed.
arXiv:2607. 14346v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Policy learning methods are increasingly used to inform treatment allocation under budget constraints.
By Johnna Sundberg, Rayid Ghani, Eli Ben-Michael, Edward Kennedy
arXiv:2608. 20019v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Incomplete multimodal sentiment analysis has garnered significant attention in recent years.
By Kaixin Xu, NaiJin Liu, Yulin Kang, Tangyue Jin, Zixuan Yu, Wenxi Zhao, Yibei Liu, Qianle Zhang, Yangyang Wu, Mengying Zhu, Meng Xi
IXPLORE is a bounded ideal point estimation algorithm that blends a predictive fit objective with a sparsity‑aware likelihood function. It outperforms both traditional model‑based methods like IRT and other machine‑learning approaches on reconstruction and imputation error across five benchmark datasets, especially for users with sparse responses. The method also incorporates non‑linear feature transforms for further error reduction while maintaining visual interpretability, and it quantifies uncertainty via grid‑based posterior inference on a bounded 2D latent space.
By Fynn Bachmann