For structural health monitoring (SHM), a complete dataset is crucial for further modal identification analysis and risk warning. Unfortunately, data loss can occur due to sensor failure, transmission system interruption, or hardware failure, which can lead to missing data. Therefore, this study proposes a bidirectional long short-term memory neural network (Bi-LSTM) response recovery method based on variational mode decomposition (VMD) and sparrow search algorithm (SSA) optimization that utilizes the structural response data between multiple sensors and can simultaneously consider temporal and spatial correlations. A dataset containing approximately half a month of monitoring data was collected from a certain project for training, validation, and testing. A publicly available dataset was also referenced to validate the proposed method in this paper. Using the public dataset, under 13 different data loss rates, the VMD + SSA + Bi-LSTM model reduced the RMSE of data reconstruction by an average of 65.01% and 45.35% compared to the Bi-LSTM model and the VMD + Bi-LSTM models, respectively, while the coefficient of determination increased by 62.21% and 11.19%. The data reconstruction method proposed in this paper can accurately reconstruct the variation trends of missing data without the manual optimization of hyperparameters, and the reconstruction results are close to the real data.

In the field of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM), complete datasets are fundamental for modal identification analysis and risk prediction. However, data loss due to sensor failures, transmission interruptions, or hardware issues is a common problem. To address this challenge, this study develops a method combining Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) and Sparrow Search Algorithm (SSA)-optimized Gate Recurrent Unit (GRU) for recovering structural response data. The methodology initially employs Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) to preprocess and decompose the existing data from the target sensor into Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) and residuals. Subsequently, the Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) network utilizes data from other sensors to reconstruct the IMFs and residuals, ultimately producing the data reconstruction results. During this process, Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA) is used to optimize the hyperparameters of the GRU network. To validate the effectiveness of this method, we utilized one month of monitoring data collected from a certain project and a publicly available dataset. On the public dataset, we tested performance at different data loss rates. Results show that, compared to a standalone GRU model and a VMD + GRU model, the VMD + SSA + GRU model’s reconstruction data root mean squared error is reduced by 46.61% and 32.57% on average, respectively, while the coefficient of determination increases by 38.74% and 18.50%. The data reconstruction method proposed in this study can accurately capture trends in missing data, without the need for manual hyperparameter tuning, and the reconstruction results are highly consistent with the real data.