Adaptive multiple imputations of missing values using the class center

Abstract

Big data has become a core technology to provide innovative solutions in many fields. However, the collected dataset for data analysis in various domains will contain missing values. Missing value imputation is the primary method for resolving problems involving incomplete datasets. Missing attribute values are replaced with values from a selected set of observed data using statistical or machine learning methods. Although machine learning techniques can generate reasonably accurate imputation results, they typically require longer imputation durations than statistical techniques. This study proposes the adaptive multiple imputations of missing values using the class center (AMICC) approach to produce effective imputation results efficiently. AMICC is based on the class center and defines a threshold from the weighted distances between the center and other observed data for the imputation step. Additionally, the distance can be an adaptive nearest neighborhood or the center to estimate the missing values. The experimental results are based on numerical, categorical, and mixed datasets from the University of California Irvine (UCI) Machine Learning Repository with introduced missing values rate from 10 to 50% in 27 datasets. The proposed AMICC approach outperforms the other missing value imputation methods with higher average accuracy at 81.48% which is higher than those of other methods about 9 – 14%. Furthermore, execution time is different from the Mean/Mode method, about seven seconds; moreover, it requires significantly less time for imputation than some machine learning approaches about 10 – 14 s.