Machine learning has been the corner stone in analysing and extracting information from data and often a problem of missing values is encountered. Missing values occur because of various factors like missing completely at random, missing at random or missing not at random. All these may result from system malfunction during data collection or human error during data pre-processing. Nevertheless, it is important to deal with missing values before analysing data since ignoring or omitting missing values may result in biased or misinformed analysis. In literature there have been several proposals for handling missing values. In this paper, we aggregate some of the literature on missing data particularly focusing on machine learning techniques. We also give insight on how the machine learning approaches work by highlighting the key features of missing values imputation techniques, how they perform, their limitations and the kind of data they are most suitable for. We propose and evaluate two methods, the k nearest neighbor and an iterative imputation method (missForest) based on the random forest algorithm. Evaluation is performed on the Iris and novel power plant fan data with induced missing values at missingness rate of 5% to 20%. We show that both missForest and the k nearest neighbor can successfully handle missing values and offer some possible future research direction.

Machine learning has been the corner stone in analysing and extracting information from data and often a problem of missing values is encountered. Missing values occur as a result of various factors like missing completely at random, missing at random or missing not at random. All these may be as a result of system malfunction during data collection or human error during data pre-processing. Nevertheless, it is important to deal with missing values before analysing data since ignoring or omitting missing values may result in biased or misinformed analysis. In literature there have been several proposals for handling missing values. In this paper we aggregate some of the literature on missing data particularly focusing on machine learning techniques. We also give insight on how the machine learning approaches work by highlighting the key features of the proposed techniques, how they perform, their limitations and the kind of data they are most suitable for. Finally, we experiment on the K nearest neighbor and random forest imputation techniques on novel power plant induced fan data and offer some possible future research direction.

The data used our analysis is from an ID fan which is part of a coal powered plant that produces a target output of 117W. The fan is placed at the outlet of the boiler. The fan runs at an air flow rate of 5365 Am3/min , with a density of 0.85 kg/m3, diameter of 2440 mm , with a total pressure of 505 mmAq and a speed of 989 rpm. The fan impeller is driven by a 650 kW electric induction motor (6600 V 50 Hz 3 Phase) with a speed of 1000 rpm.