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new Abstract: Foundation models mark a profound paradigm shift in time series modeling, with task-specific models being superseded by general-purpose zero-shot models.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