Multivariate Data Imputation using Trees

We address the problem of completing two files with records containing a fully observed common subset of variables. The tecnique investigated involves the use of regression and/or classification trees. An extension of current methodology (the intersection-seeking or "forest-climbing" algorithm) is proposed to deal with multivariate response variables. The method is demonstrated and shown to be feasible and have some desirable properties.file completion, data imputation, regression trees

Data Imputation through the Identification of Local Anomalies

We introduce a comprehensive and statistical framework in a model free setting for a complete treatment of localized data corruptions due to severe noise sources, e.g., an occluder in the case of a visual recording. Within this framework, we propose i) a novel algorithm to efficiently separate, i.e., detect and localize, possible corruptions from a given suspicious data instance and ii) a Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) estimator to impute the corrupted data. As a generalization to Euclidean distance, we also propose a novel distance measure, which is based on the ranked deviations among the data attributes and empirically shown to be superior in separating the corruptions. Our algorithm first splits the suspicious instance into parts through a binary partitioning tree in the space of data attributes and iteratively tests those parts to detect local anomalies using the nominal statistics extracted from an uncorrupted (clean) reference data set. Once each part is labeled as anomalous vs normal, the corresponding binary patterns over this tree that characterize corruptions are identified and the affected attributes are imputed. Under a certain conditional independency structure assumed for the binary patterns, we analytically show that the false alarm rate of the introduced algorithm in detecting the corruptions is independent of the data and can be directly set without any parameter tuning. The proposed framework is tested over several well-known machine learning data sets with synthetically generated corruptions; and experimentally shown to produce remarkable improvements in terms of classification purposes with strong corruption separation capabilities. Our experiments also indicate that the proposed algorithms outperform the typical approaches and are robust to varying training phase conditions

Improving Missing Data Imputation with Deep Generative Models

Datasets with missing values are very common on industry applications, and they can have a negative impact on machine learning models. Recent studies introduced solutions to the problem of imputing missing values based on deep generative models. Previous experiments with Generative Adversarial Networks and Variational Autoencoders showed interesting results in this domain, but it is not clear which method is preferable for different use cases. The goal of this work is twofold: we present a comparison between missing data imputation solutions based on deep generative models, and we propose improvements over those methodologies. We run our experiments using known real life datasets with different characteristics, removing values at random and reconstructing them with several imputation techniques. Our results show that the presence or absence of categorical variables can alter the selection of the best model, and that some models are more stable than others after similar runs with different random number generator seeds

Multi-Output Gaussian Processes for Crowdsourced Traffic Data Imputation

Traffic speed data imputation is a fundamental challenge for data-driven transport analysis. In recent years, with the ubiquity of GPS-enabled devices and the widespread use of crowdsourcing alternatives for the collection of traffic data, transportation professionals increasingly look to such user-generated data for many analysis, planning, and decision support applications. However, due to the mechanics of the data collection process, crowdsourced traffic data such as probe-vehicle data is highly prone to missing observations, making accurate imputation crucial for the success of any application that makes use of that type of data. In this article, we propose the use of multi-output Gaussian processes (GPs) to model the complex spatial and temporal patterns in crowdsourced traffic data. While the Bayesian nonparametric formalism of GPs allows us to model observation uncertainty, the multi-output extension based on convolution processes effectively enables us to capture complex spatial dependencies between nearby road segments. Using 6 months of crowdsourced traffic speed data or "probe vehicle data" for several locations in Copenhagen, the proposed approach is empirically shown to significantly outperform popular state-of-the-art imputation methods.Comment: 10 pages, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 201

Lung Segmentation from Chest X-rays using Variational Data Imputation

Pulmonary opacification is the inflammation in the lungs caused by many respiratory ailments, including the novel corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Chest X-rays (CXRs) with such opacifications render regions of lungs imperceptible, making it difficult to perform automated image analysis on them. In this work, we focus on segmenting lungs from such abnormal CXRs as part of a pipeline aimed at automated risk scoring of COVID-19 from CXRs. We treat the high opacity regions as missing data and present a modified CNN-based image segmentation network that utilizes a deep generative model for data imputation. We train this model on normal CXRs with extensive data augmentation and demonstrate the usefulness of this model to extend to cases with extreme abnormalities.Comment: Accepted to be presented at the first Workshop on the Art of Learning with Missing Values (Artemiss) hosted by the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). Source code, training data and the trained models are available here: https://github.com/raghavian/lungVAE