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.

In the current technology driven era, the use of devices that connect to the internet has increased significantly. Consequently, there has been a significant increase in internet traffic. Some of the challenges that arise from the increased traffic include, but are not limited to, multiple clients on a single server (which can result in denial of service (DoS)), difficulty in network scalability, and poor service availability. One of the solutions proposed in literature, to mitigate these, is the use of multiple servers with a load balancer. Despite their common use, load balancers, have shown to have some disadvantages, like being vendor specific and non-programmable. To address these disadvantages and improve internet traffic, there has been a paradigm shift which resulted in the introduction of software defined networking (SDN). SDN allows for load balancers that are programmable and provides the flexibility for one to design and implement own load balancing strategies. In this survey, we highlight the key elements of SDN and OpenFlow technology and their effect on load balancing. We provide an overview of the various load balancing schemes in SDN. The overview is based on research challenges, existing solutions, and we give possible future research directions. A summary of emulators/mathematical tools commonly used in the design of intelligent load balancing SDN algorithms is provided. Finally, we outline the performance metrics used to evaluate the algorithms.

Tensor completion is a higher way analog of matrix completion, which has proven to be a powerful tool for data analysis. In this paper, we formulate the missing data recovery problem of a three-way tensor as a tensor completion problem. We propose a novel tensor completion method based on tensor-CUR decomposition to estimate the missing data from limited samples. Computational experiments demonstrate that the proposed method yields a superior performance over other existing approaches.

Achieving reliable intervehicle positioning is one of the most fundamental elements for many vehicular applications, including collision avoidance and autonomous driving. Vehicle position is generally provided by a global navigation satellite system (GNSS), which unfortunately suffers from inaccuracy to varying degrees in challenging environments, for example, GNSS outages. In this article, a reliable fusion technique, called non-Gaussian Redheffer weighted least squares ( $n$ GRWLSs), is proposed. This new approach highlights the intervehicle positioning estimation in multi-GNSS outage environments, such as complete, partial, and free GNSS pseudorange outages. The proposed method combines, on the one hand, the benefits of the Gaussian dynamical matrix principle and the Redheffer distribution function for the sparse property in complete GNSS pseudorange outages and, on the other hand, the use of the optimal window size to regulate the data flow generated by both the inertial navigation systems (INSs) and GNSS during a partial GNSS pseudorange outage. During the free GNSS pseudorange outage, the process ignores data from the INS, and instead, GNSS pseudorange information alone will be considered to compute the intervehicle positioning information. Consequently, weighted least squares is used as an intervehicle positioning estimator. To address the pseudorange uncommon and INS measurement noises, the generalized error distribution (GED) is used to estimate the non-Gaussian densities. Finally, road-test experiments are implemented to evaluate the consistency of the proposed approach. The experimental results show that the proposed $n$ GRWLS can accurately estimate the intervehicle positioning under various conditions (free, partial, and complete GNSS pseudorange outages).

The emergence of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) greatly improves the convenience of network layout, and at the same time reduces the service cost for operators. Currently, many studies on NFV layout focus on one-to-one unicast communication and cannot be extended to multicast. Therefore, in this paper, we are committed to exploring the joint problem of Virtual Network Function (VNF) layout and path selection in multi-source multicast. In addition, we take into account bandwidth and latency constraints, for they are the vital indices of Quality of Service (QoS). To solve this problem, we design a heuristic algorithm, named Multi-Source Multicast Tree Construction (MMTC). The algorithm aims to find a common link to place the Service Function Chain (SFC), a chain composed by multiple VNFs in rotation manner, so that the deployed SFC can be shared by all users, thereby improving the resource utilization. We then evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm with different methods in four real topologies. Simulation results indicate that, compared to other heuristic algorithms, our design effectively reduce the total cost of services.