Imputation of missing data with class imbalance using conditional generative adversarial networks

Abstract

Missing data is a common problem faced with real-world datasets. Imputation is a widely used technique to estimate the missing data. State-of-the-art imputation approaches model the distribution of observed data to approximate the missing values. Such an approach usually models a single distribution for the entire dataset, which overlooks the class-specific characteristics of the data. Class-specific characteristics are especially useful when there is a class imbalance. We propose a new method for imputing missing data based on its class-specific characteristics by adapting the popular Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (CGAN). Our Conditional Generative Adversarial Imputation Network (CGAIN) imputes the missing data using class-specific distributions, which can produce the best estimates for the missing values. We tested our approach on baseline datasets and achieved superior performance compared with the state-of-the-art and popular imputation approaches.