MIAEC: Missing Data Imputation Based on the Evidence Chain

Missing or incorrect data caused by improper operations can seriously compromise security investigation. Missing data can not only damage the integrity of the information but also lead to the deviation of the data mining and analysis. Therefore, it is necessary to implement the imputation of missing value in the phase of data preprocessing to reduce the possibility of data missing as a result of human error and operations. The performances of existing imputation approaches of missing value cannot satisfy the analysis requirements due to its low accuracy and poor stability, especially the rapid decreasing imputation accuracy with the increasing rate of missing data. In this paper, we propose a novel missing value imputation algorithm based on the evidence chain (MIAEC), which first mines all relevant evidence of missing values in each data tuple and then combines this relevant evidence to build the evidence chain for further estimation of missing values. To extend MIAEC for large-scale data processing, we apply the map-reduce programming model to realize the distribution and parallelization of MIAEC. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can provide higher imputation accuracy compared with the missing data imputation algorithm based on naive Bayes, the mode imputation algorithm, and the proposed missing data imputation algorithm based on K-nearest neighbor. MIAEC has higher imputation accuracy and its imputation accuracy is also assured with the increasing rate of missing value or the position change of missing value. MIAEC is also proved to be suitable for the distributed computing platform and can achieve an ideal speedup ratio.