Path Imputation Strategies for Signature Models of Irregular Time Series

The signature transform is a 'universal nonlinearity' on the space of continuous vector-valued paths, and has received attention for use in machine learning on time series. However, real-world temporal data is typically observed at discrete points in time, and must first be transformed into a continuous path before signature techniques can be applied. We make this step explicit by characterising it as an imputation problem, and empirically assess the impact of various imputation strategies when applying signature-based neural nets to irregular time series data. For one of these strategies, Gaussian process (GP) adapters, we propose an extension~(GP-PoM) that makes uncertainty information directly available to the subsequent classifier while at the same time preventing costly Monte-Carlo (MC) sampling. In our experiments, we find that the choice of imputation drastically affects shallow signature models, whereas deeper architectures are more robust. Next, we observe that uncertainty-aware predictions (based on GP-PoM or indicator imputations) are beneficial for predictive performance, even compared to the uncertainty-aware training of conventional GP adapters. In conclusion, we have demonstrated that the path construction is indeed crucial for signature models and that our proposed strategy leads to competitive performance in general, while improving robustness of signature models in particular.