Different ways of imputing missing data
While working with any time series, it can happen that some data is missing, due to many possible reasons (someone forgot to input the data, a random issue with the database, and so on). One of the available solutions would be to discard observations with missing values. However, imagine a scenario in which we are analyzing multiple time series at once, and only one of the series is missing a value due to some random mistake. Do we still want to remove all the other potentially valuable pieces of information because of this single missing value? Probably not. And there are many other potential scenarios in which we would rather treat the missing values somehow, rather than discarding those observations.
Two of the simplest approaches to imputing missing time series data are:
- Backward filling—fill the missing value with the next known value
- Forward filling—fill the missing value with the previous known value...
