A Hybrid Imputation Method for Multi-Pattern Missing Data: A Case Study on Type II Diabetes Diagnosis

Real medical datasets usually consist of missing data with different patterns which decrease the performance of classifiers used in intelligent healthcare and disease diagnosis systems. Many methods have been proposed to impute missing data, however, they do not fulfill the need for data quality especially in real datasets with different missing data patterns. In this paper, a four-layer model is introduced, and then a hybrid imputation (HIMP) method using this model is proposed to impute multi-pattern missing data including non-random, random, and completely random patterns. In HIMP, first, non-random missing data patterns are imputed, and then the obtained dataset is decomposed into two datasets containing random and completely random missing data patterns. Then, concerning the missing data patterns in each dataset, different single or multiple imputation methods are used. Finally, the best-imputed datasets gained from random and completely random patterns are merged to form the final dataset. The experimental evaluation was conducted by a real dataset named IRDia including all three missing data patterns. The proposed method and comparative methods were compared using different classifiers in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The classifiers’ performances show that the HIMP can impute multi-pattern missing values more effectively than other comparative methods.