Abstract
Limited research has assessed the accuracy of imputation methods in aerobiological datasets. We conducted a simulation study to evaluate, for the first time, the effectiveness of Gappy Singular Value Decomposition (GSVD), a data-driven approach, comparing it with the moving mean interpolation, a statistical approach. Utilizing complete pollen data from two monitoring stations in northeastern Italy for 2022, we randomly generated missing data considering the combination of various proportions (5%, 10%, 25%) and gap lengths (3, 5, 7, 10 days). We imputed 4800 time series using the GSVD algorithm, specifically implemented for this study, and the moving mean algorithm of the “AeRobiology” R package. We assessed imputation accuracy by calculating the Root Mean Square Error and employed multiple linear regression models to identify factors independently affecting the error (e.g. pollen variability, simulation settings). The results showed that the GSVD was as good as the well-established moving mean method and demonstrated its strong generalization capabilities across different data types. However, the imputation error was primarily influenced by pollen characteristics and location, regardless of the imputation method used. High variability in pollen concentrations and the distribution of missing data negatively affected imputation accuracy. In conclusion, we introduced and tested a novel imputation method, demonstrating comparable performance to the statistical approach in aerobiological data reconstruction. These findings contribute to advancing aerobiological data analysis, highlighting the need for improving imputation methods.