VIGAN: Missing view imputation with generative adversarial networks

In an era when big data are becoming the norm, there is less concern with the quantity but more with the quality and completeness of the data. In many disciplines, data are collected from heterogeneous sources, resulting in multi-view or multi-modal datasets. The missing data problem has been challenging to address in multi-view data analysis. Especially, when certain samples miss an entire view of data, it creates the missing view problem. Classic multiple imputations or matrix completion methods are hardly effective here when no information can be based on in the specific view to impute data for such samples. The commonly-used simple method of removing samples with a missing view can dramatically reduce sample size, thus diminishing the statistical power of a subsequent analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for view imputation via generative adversarial networks (GANs), which we name by VIGAN. This approach first treats each view as a separate domain and identifies domain-to-domain mappings via a GAN using randomly-sampled data from each view, and then employs a multi-modal denoising autoencoder (DAE) to reconstruct the missing view from the GAN outputs based on paired data across the views. Then, by optimizing the GAN and DAE jointly, our model enables the knowledge integration for domain mappings and view correspondences to effectively recover the missing view. Empirical results on benchmark datasets validate the VIGAN approach by comparing against the state of the art. The evaluation of VIGAN in a genetic study of substance use disorders further proves the effectiveness and usability of this approach in life science.