Missing data imputation with fuzzy feature selection for diabetes dataset

Abstract

Missing data in datasets remain as a difficulty in terms of data analysis in various research fields, especially in the medical field, as it affects the treatment and diagnosis that the patient should receive. In this research, Fuzzy c-means (FCM) are used to impute the missing data. However, like in most data imputation methods, FCM do not consider the presence of irrelevant features. Irrelevant features can increase the computational time of the imputation process and decrease the accuracy of the prediction. Feature selection techniques can alleviate this problem by selecting the most relevant features and reducing the dataset size. Fuzzy principal component analysis (FPCA) is used as the feature selection method in this study as it considers the presence of outliers compared to classical PCA as outliers are the main reason some features renders irrelevant. Therefore, an improved hybrid imputation model of FPCA–Support vector machines–FCM (FPCA–SVM–FCM) has been proposed and employed in this study. The efficiency of the proposed model is investigated on one dataset which is Pima Indians Diabetes dataset. Experimental results showed that the proposed hybrid imputation model is better than the existing methods by producing a more accurate estimation in terms of accuracy, RMSE and MAE. The proposed method was also validated by using Wilcoxon rank sum and Theil’s U test and obtained good results compared to SVM–FCM. Therefore, it can be used as an alternative tool for handling missing data in order to obtain a better quality dataset.