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A reinforcement learning-based approach for imputing missing data
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

A reinforcement learning-based approach for imputing missing data

S.E. Awan, M. Bennamoun, F. Sohel, F. Sanfilippo and G. Dwivedi
Neural Computing and Applications
2022
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Abstract

Missing data is a major problem in real-world datasets, which hinders the performance of data analytics. Conventional data imputation schemes such as univariate single imputation replace missing values in each column with the same approximated value. These univariate single imputation techniques underestimate the variance of the imputed values. On the other hand, multivariate imputation explores the relationships between different columns of data, to impute the missing values. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a machine learning paradigm where the agent learns by taking actions and receiving rewards in response, to achieve its goal. In this work, we propose an RL-based approach to impute missing data by learning a policy to impute data through an action-reward-based experience. Our approach imputes missing values in a column by working only on the same column (similar to univariate single imputation) but imputes the missing values in the column with different values thus keeping the variance in the imputed values. We report superior performance of our approach, compared with other imputation techniques, on a number of datasets.

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Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
Citation topics
9 Mathematics
9.92 Statistical Methods
9.92.220 Robust Estimation
Web Of Science research areas
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
ESI research areas
Engineering
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