CBRL and CBRC: Novel Algorithms for Improving Missing Value Imputation Accuracy Based on Bayesian Ridge Regression

Abstract

In most scientific studies such as data analysis, the existence of missing data is a critical problem, and selecting the appropriate approach to deal with missing data is a challenge. In this paper, the authors perform a fair comparative study of some practical imputation methods used for handling missing values against two proposed imputation algorithms. The proposed algorithms depend on the Bayesian Ridge technique under two different feature selection conditions. The proposed algorithms differ from the existing approaches in that they cumulate the imputed features; those imputed features will be incorporated within the Bayesian Ridge equation for predicting the missing values in the next incomplete selected feature. The authors applied the proposed algorithms on eight datasets with different amount of missing values created from different missingness mechanisms. The performance was measured in terms of imputation time, root-mean-square error (RMSE), coefficient of determination (R2), and mean absolute error (MAE). The results showed that the performance varies depending on missing values percentage, size of the dataset, and the missingness mechanism. In addition, the performance of the proposed methods is slightly better.