Title
Missing values: how many can they be to preserve classification reliability?
Abstract
Using five medical datasets we detected the influence of missing values on true positive rates and classification accuracy. We randomly marked more and more values as missing and tested their effects on classification accuracy. The classifications were performed with nearest neighbour searching when none, 10, 20, 30% or more values were missing. We also used discriminant analysis and naïve Bayesian method for the classification. We discovered that for a two-class dataset, despite as high as 20---30% missing values, almost as good results as with no missing value could still be produced. If there are more than two classes, over 10---20% missing values are probably too many, at least for small classes with relatively few cases. The more classes and the more classes of different sizes, a classification task is the more sensitive to missing values. On the other hand, when values are missing on the basis of actual distributions affected by some selection or non-random cause and not fully random, classification can tolerate even high numbers of missing values for some datasets.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1007/s10462-011-9282-2
Artif. Intell. Rev.
Keywords
Field
DocType
Medical data,Missing values,Distance measures,Imputation,Classification,Nearest neighbour searching
Data mining,Nearest neighbour,Pattern recognition,Naive Bayes classifier,Computer science,Artificial intelligence,Linear discriminant analysis,Missing data,Imputation (statistics),Distance measures
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
40
3
0269-2821
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.37
9
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Martti Juhola145663.94
Jorma Laurikkala234524.82