Handling incomplete data classification using imputed feature selected bagging (IFBag) method

Abstract

Almost all real-world datasets contain missing values. Classification of data with missing values can adversely affect the performance of a classifier if not handled correctly. A common approach used for classification with incomplete data is imputation. Imputation transforms incomplete data with missing values to complete data. Single imputation methods are mostly less accurate than multiple imputation methods which are often computationally much more expensive. This study proposes an imputed feature selected bagging (IFBag) method which uses multiple imputation, feature selection and bagging ensemble learning approach to construct a number of base classifiers to classify new incomplete instances without any need for imputation in testing phase. In bagging ensemble learning approach, data is resampled multiple times with substitution, which can lead to diversity in data thus resulting in more accurate classifiers. The experimental results show the proposed IFBag method is considerably fast and gives 97.26% accuracy for classification with incomplete data as compared to common methods used.