arXiv Machine Learning

Hybrid Methods for Robust Tabular Data Imputation

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

One Pipeline, Many Transformers: Pattern-Specific Imputation Specialists for Tabular Missing Data

The paper introduces a pre‑training pipeline that creates transformer‑based imputation specialists for tabular data with specific missingness patterns. By featurizing entries, generating synthetic data with configurable missingness modules, and fitting on millions of synthetic tables, the pipeline produces pattern‑specific models that outperform dedicated methods for each missingness pattern. A default model trained only on MCAR data, TabImpute, remains robust across all tested patterns, and the authors release the pipeline, models, and a new benchmark of 42 datasets and 11 missingness patterns.

By Jacob Feitelberg, Dwaipayan Saha, Kyuseong Choi, Zaid Ahmad, Anish Agarwal, Raaz Dwivedi
arXiv AI
Sep 21

A Hybrid Computational Intelligence Framework for scRNA-seq Imputation: Integrating scRecover and Random Forests

The paper introduces SCR-MF, a two‑stage workflow for single‑cell RNA sequencing imputation that first detects dropout events with scRecover and then imputes missing values using the non‑parametric missForest algorithm. Benchmarking on public and simulated datasets shows that SCR‑MF delivers robust, interpretable results that match or surpass existing methods while maintaining biological fidelity. Runtime analysis indicates that SCR‑MF balances accuracy with computational efficiency, making it well suited for mid‑scale single‑cell studies.

By Ali Anaissi, Deshao Liu, Yuanzhe Jia, Weidong Huang, Widad Alyassine, Junaid Akram
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 3

Learning What Not to Impute: An Uncertainty-Aware Diffusion Framework for Meaningful Missingness

Missing value imputation is a fundamental task in machine learning, with most existing methods assuming that all missing entries correspond to unobserved regular values. In many real-world datasets, however, missingness may arise from two distinct sources: some entries are meaningfully missing (intrinsically absent and semantically valid), while others are missing due to the observation process and should be imputed.

arXiv AI
Aug 20

Discretizing Continuous Time Series for Imputation with Masked Diffusion Training

The paper introduces the Masked Diffusion Time-series Imputation Model (MDTIM), which uses a masked diffusion training paradigm to directly predict original values for time series imputation. It separates missing and observed data via a MASK token and employs Stochastic Discretization to convert continuous values into ordinal-aware tokens, preserving temporal dynamics. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that MDTIM outperforms existing deterministic and generative baselines in robustness and scalability across various missing data scenarios.

By Dongbin Kim, Seungyun Lee, Geonwoo Shin, Jaewook Lee
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Fed-ReMasker: Federated Tabular Imputation under Feature-Level Missingness

Fed-ReMasker is a federated learning approach that adapts the ReMasker masked autoencoder for tabular data imputation, specifically addressing feature-level missingness where entire features are absent at some centers. The method enables centers to impute unobserved features by leveraging knowledge from collaborating institutions. In benchmark tests on synthetic and real-world datasets, Fed-ReMasker achieves the lowest imputation error in the majority of scenarios and remains robust to client heterogeneity, closely matching the performance of a centralized model.

By Ioannis Papathanail, Rooholla Poursoleymani, Lubnaa Abdur Rahman, Stavroula Georgia Mougiakakou