arXiv Machine Learning

When Does Task-Aware Imputation Matter? An Analysis of Robustness Under Train-Test Mismatch

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 Machine Learning
Oct 2

Hybrid Methods for Robust Tabular Data Imputation

The paper introduces two hybrid imputation methods, NuclearForest and SoftForest, that combine a low‑rank initialization (using Singular Value Thresholding or SoftImpute) with a single Random Forest refinement. These methods capture global covariance patterns and local nonlinear dependencies, respectively, and are benchmarked against seven existing techniques across MCAR, MAR, and MNAR scenarios. Results show comparable or superior imputation accuracy to state‑of‑the‑art iterative methods while achieving significant speedups of roughly 5.8× and 9.5× over MissForest.

By Jinwei Li, Michelle Bruch, Daniel Tenbrinck
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.