faircutforest
Imputing missing values with unsupervised random trees
When designing statistical models from tabular data for supervised learning tasks such as regression or classification, oftentimes it happens that some of th e observations available for fitting such models are missing values in one or more variables, usually d ue to reasons such as poor data collection practices, loss of information, participants dropping out of a survey, or similar. Many methods such as [2] or [4] overcome this issue by using heuristics to handle missing information - decision tree methods in particular, due to their splitting nature that takes one variable at a time, are particularly well suited for implicit han dling of missing data without a-priori imputation ([16]), but other methods such as gene ralized linear models or support vector machines cannot handle missing values in the same wa y, and when using them on a dataset with missing entries, these entries have to either be dr opped or imputed. Typical strategies for imputing the missing entries include: replacing them with the column mean or median, determining the most similar observations (nearest neighbors) according to the non-missing variables and taking a simple or weighted average of the m issing variable(s) from them ([11]), producing a latent representation of the data by some low-rank matrix factorization that minimizes errors on the non-missing entries and from which the m issing entries are then reconstructed ([10]), and iterative imputation that starts with so me basic imputation for all values and then cycles through each variable by constructing a mod el to predict the missing values from the non-missing observations, replacing the earlier impu tation with the model prediction and repeating until convergence ([3], [18]).