A Survey On Missing Data in Machine Learning

Abstract Machine learning has been the corner stone in analysing and extracting information from data and often a problem of missing values is encountered. Missing values occur as a result of various factors like missing completely at random, missing at random or missing not at random. All these may be as a result of system malfunction during data collection or human error during data pre-processing. Nevertheless, it is important to deal with missing values before analysing data since ignoring or omitting missing values may result in biased or misinformed analysis. In literature there have been several proposals for handling missing values. In this paper we aggregate some of the literature on missing data particularly focusing on machine learning techniques. We also give insight on how the machine learning approaches work by highlighting the key features of the proposed techniques, how they perform, their limitations and the kind of data they are most suitable for. Finally, we experiment on the K nearest neighbor and random forest imputation techniques on novel power plant induced fan data and offer some possible future research direction.