# The missing data problem

Missing data is ubiquitous and poses a challenging problem for analysts, data scientists and machine learning engineers. Among other things, getting analysis methods, machine learning procedures and corresponding software to run at all in the presence of missing data, on the other hand, the constant question lurking in the background as to whether the models created are at all valid and generalizable. Unfortunately, implicitly applied ad hoc methods such as listwise deletion, mean imputation, and complete case analysis are still very often used without analyzing their effect on the results. Most research papers do not even mention how missing data was handled, probably to get through the review process and this methodology seems to be common practice in economics as well.

“Obviously the best way to treat missing data is not to have them.” ‘— Orchard and Woodbury 1972, p. 697’

It is obvious that this raises legitimate concerns about the correctness of the respective analysis results and, in my opinion, it is often necessary to take into account the different scenarios created by the way missing data have been handled.

## Reasons for missing values

There are plenty of reasons for missing data, from sensor failure to data transmission errors or more commonly in the software engineering and business domains, due to inconsequentially and inconsistently captured metrics and KPIs due to, for example, a missing digitization and data management strategy. Another example for missing data is data being blocked by the visitor of a web presence, e.g. user agent information. The reason for missing data which can be broadly categorized as either missing intentionally or missing unintentionally, where intentionally missing data was planned by the data collector. Example for intentionally missing data would be intentionally excluded sample units or missing data due to the routing of an questionnaire or censored data. Unintentionally missing data is often foreseen but essentially an unplanned occurence and not under control of the data collector. Examples of this are the missing user agent data due to blocking by the web site visitor mentioned at the beginning, or sloppily completed and managed process metrics in tools to support a software engineering process or sales.

Knowing the reasons for missing values is a helpful first step towards identifying the missingness mechanism underlying the missing values which is needed to select an appropriate missing value imputation solution.

## Missingness mechanisms

The missingness mechanism is a foundation concept in working with missing data defined by Rubin (1976). Rubin classified missing data problems into three categories according to the likehood of data points being missing. The missing data mechanism or response mechanism is the process that governs these probabilities according to Stef van Buuren (2018).

The missing data mechanism is said to be missing completely at random (MCAR) if the probability of being missing is the same for all data points, which means that causes for missingness are unrelated to the data. In the fortunate and mostly unrealistic case that MCAR is true, then we are able to ignore many of the complexities that arise due to missing data and may even employ simple ad-hoc solutions for addressing missing data.

The missing data mechanism is said to be missing at random (MAR) if the probability of data points being missing is the same only within groups in the observed data. Thus the data is MCAR only within those groups and the probability of being missing varies between groups.

If the missingness mechanism is neither MCAR nor MAR the missingness mechanism is called missing not at random (MNAR). Essentially, this means that the probability of data points missing varies because of reasons we do not know.

The reasons for missingness as well as the missingness mechanisms are necessary concepts for being able to reason about why some missing value imputation solutions may work for our distinct missing value problem and some do not.

## A review on the problems of missing value imputation solutions

Missing value imputaton is different from data synthesis or prediction due to the underlying missingness reasons and mechanisms. Most solutions, even more advanced regression and machine learning solutions, only hold, given that the underlying missingness mechanism MCAR is true, which is very often not the case.

The problem with imputing predicted values is that they only yield realistic imputation, if the prediction is close to perfection but that would be like recreation of the missing data from the available data which naturally strengthens the relations between the variables and therefor will bias correlations upwards. Essentially the variability of the data is underestimated and the imputations are too good to be true according to van Buuren (2018).

For example, in reality the data may be missing because they are outliers with weak relations to the remaining data. Imputing predited data would not estimate this weak relation and would result in false positives and spurios relations.

## Solution approaches to the problems of missing value imputation

As already mentioned, the goal of a missing value imputation solution is to stably impute missing values such that there is no bias introduced under any of the missingness mechanisms MCAR, MAR, and MNAR. Most simple approaches like listwise or pairwise deletion only hold within MCAR and reduce the available information considerably. Mean imputation strongly reduces variance in the data and results in to small standard error. Regression imputation may hold under MAR but strengthens the relation of the variables and essentially results in the standard error being too small. Last observation carried forward (LOCF), in case of time-to-event data, as well as first observation carried backward (FOCB) yields a too small standard error as well and they do not hold true under any missingness mechanism. The same is true for the indicator imputation solution.

There are some interesting approaches addressing the above short-comings of ad-hoc solutions with stochastic regression imputation introducing the concept of drawing random noise from the regression residuals, essentially spoiling the best imputation. This may seem counter-intuitive at a first glance but prevents imputations from being too good to be true while preserving the correlation between the variables.

Another promising approach is multiple imputation. Using multiple imputation one creates $m > 1$ complete data sets, where each data set is analyzed individually. The $m$ analysis results are then pooled into a final estimate including the standard error by some pooling rules. The imputed values are drawn from a distribution modeled individually for each missing entry, so that the $m$ data sets are complete but differ in the imputations only. The magnitude of differences between the imputations models the uncertainty we have about the missing values effectively.

Stochastic regression imputation and multible imputation especially may be computational prohibitive in face of very large data sets and large proportions of missingness.

An interesting approach would be to utilize the context a data set was created for and within to find correlated information for imputation thus reducing the amount of data needed as well as unnecessary noise with the help of unsupervised contextual clustering, while preserving the statistical properties of the data set.

## Conclusion

Correct and stable missing value imputation is a challenging problem closely related to prediction and data synthesis approaches. Most of the content here was drawn from the excellent introduction to missing value imputation from Steven van Buuren based on the groundbreaking work on missing value imputation by Donald B. Rubin.

This article introduced the challenging problem of missing value impution and highlighted some of the difficulties facing missing data. Short-comings of ad-hoc missing value imputation solutions were addressed and some conceptual solution approaches were discussed.

In the next article I will discuss stochastic regression imputation, multiple imputation, and recent machine learning based imputation approaches including there strengths and short-comings in greater detail.

Kind regards,

Henrik

## References

##### Henrik Hain
###### Senior Data Scientist / Data Engineer

My (research) interests evolve around the practical and theoretical aspects of software engineering, (self-) learning systems and algorithms, especially (deep) reinforcement learning, spatio-temporal event detection, and computer vision approaches.