Research papersApplication of a novel hybrid method for spatiotemporal data imputation: A case study of the Minqin County groundwater level

•We propose a new imputation model for spatiotemporal data analysis and modeling.•This method has been used to successfully impute monthly groundwater level missing series.•This method is superior to three well-studied methods in terms of accuracy and robustness under various random missing ratio.•A cross-validation technique is added into the combined model and let this model becomes a robust model.

The techniques for data analyses have been widely developed in past years, however, missing data still represent a ubiquitous problem in many scientific fields. In particular, dealing with missing spatiotemporal data presents an enormous challenge. Nonetheless, in recent years, a considerable amount of research has focused on spatiotemporal problems, making spatiotemporal missing data imputation methods increasingly indispensable. In this paper, a novel spatiotemporal hybrid method is proposed to verify and imputed spatiotemporal missing values. This new method, termed SOM-FLSSVM, flexibly combines three advanced techniques: self-organizing feature map (SOM) clustering, the fruit fly optimization algorithm (FOA) and the least squares support vector machine (LSSVM). We employ a cross-validation (CV) procedure and FOA swarm intelligence optimization strategy that can search available parameters and determine the optimal imputation model. The spatiotemporal underground water data for Minqin County, China, were selected to test the reliability and imputation ability of SOM-FLSSVM. We carried out a validation experiment and compared three well-studied models with SOM-FLSSVM using a different missing data ratio from 0.1 to 0.8 in the same data set. The results demonstrate that the new hybrid method performs well in terms of both robustness and accuracy for spatiotemporal missing data.

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