Regression with Missing Data, a Comparison Study of TechniquesBased on Random Forests

Random forests and recursive trees are widely used in applied statistics and computer science. The popularity of recursive trees relies on several factors: their easy interpretability, the fact that they can be used for both regression and classification tasks, the small number of hyper-parameters to be tuned and finally, their non-parametric nature that allows their use to infer arbitrarily complex relations between the input and the output space. A random forest combines several randomized trees, improving the prediction accuracy at a cost of a slight lost in interpretation. This technique is easily parallelizable which has made it one of the most popular tools for handling high dimensional data sets. It has been successfully involved in various practical problems, including chemioinformatics, ecology, 3D object recognition, bioinformatics and econometrics. Biau and Scornet (2016) present a detailed list of applications as well as a review on random forests. In the present work we have focused on the ability of random forests to deal with missing values.