Missing data imputation using supervised learning methods

Missing data is a very common problem in all research fields. Case deletion is a simple way to handle incomplete data sets which could mislead to biased statistical results. A more reliable approach to handle missing values is imputation which allows covariate-dependent missing mechanism, as well. This paper aims to prepare guidance for researchers facing missing data problems by comparing various imputation methods including machine learning techniques, to achieve better results in supervised learning tasks. A benchmark dataset has experimented and the results are compared by applying popular classifiers over varying missing mechanisms and rates on this benchmark dataset.

Keywords:

Imputation , Machine learning algorithms , Missing data , Missing mechanism