Missing Data Imputation – A Survey

Abstract

Many real world datasets may contain missing values for various reasons. These incomplete datasets can pose severe issues to the underlying machine learning algorithms and decision support systems. It may result in high computational cost, skewed output and invalid deductions. Various solutions exist to mitigate this issue; the most popular strategy is to estimate the missing values by applying inferential techniques such as linear regression, decision trees or Bayesian inference. In this paper, the missing data problem is discussed in detail with a comprehensive review of the approaches to tackle it. The paper concludes with a discussion on the effectiveness of three imputation methods namely, imputation based on Multiple Linear Regression (MLR), Predictive Mean Matching (PMM) and Classification And Regression Tree (CART) in the context of subspace clustering. The experimental results obtained on real benchmark datasets and high-dimensional synthetic datasets highlight that, MLR based imputation method is more efficient on high-dimensional incomplete datasets.