Estimation of Missing Data Using Computational Intelligence and Decision Trees

This paper introduces a novel paradigm to impute missing data that combines a decision tree with an auto-associative neural network (AANN) based model and a principal component analysis-neural network (PCA-NN) based model. For each model, the decision tree is used to predict search bounds for a genetic algorithm that minimize an error function derived from the respective model. The models' ability to impute missing data is tested and compared using HIV sero-prevalance data. Results indicate an average increase in accuracy of 13% with the AANN based model's average accuracy increasing from 75.8% to 86.3% while that of the PCA-NN based model increasing from 66.1% to 81.6%.