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Missing value (MV) imputation is a critical preprocessing means for data mining. Nevertheless, existing MV imputation methods are mostly designed for batch processing, and thus are not applicable to streaming data, especially those with poor quality. In this article, we propose a framework, called Real-time and Error-tolerant Missing vAlue ImputatioN (REMAIN), to impute MVs in poor-quality streaming data. Instead of imputing MVs based on all the observed data, REMAIN first initializes the MV imputation model based on a-RANSAC which is capable of detecting and rejecting anomalies in an efficient manner, and then incrementally updates the model parameters upon the arrival of new data to support real-time MV imputation. As the correlations among attributes of the data may change over time in unforseenable ways, we devise a deterioration detection mechanism to capture the deterioration of the imputation model to further improve the imputation accuracy. Finally, we conduct an extensive evaluation on the proposed algorithms using real-world and synthetic datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that REMAIN achieves significantly higher imputation accuracy over existing solutions. Meanwhile, REMAIN improves up to one order of magnitude in time cost compared with existing approaches.
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Certain and Approximately Certain Models for Statistical Learning
Real-world data is often incomplete and contains missing values. To train accurate models over real-world datasets, users need to spend a substantial amount of time and resources imputing and finding proper values for missing data items. In this paper, we demonstrate that it is possible to learn accurate models directly from data with missing values for certain training data and target models. We propose a unified approach for checking the necessity of data imputation to learn accurate models across various widely-used machine learning paradigms. We build efficient algorithms with theoretical guarantees to check this necessity and return accurate models in cases where imputation is unnecessary. Our extensive experiments indicate that our proposed algorithms significantly reduce the amount of time and effort needed for data imputation without imposing considerable computational overhead.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1941892
- PAR ID:
- 10505270
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proc. ACM Manag. Data
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3654929
