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Imputation techniques on missing values in breast cancer treatment and fertility data

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Abstract

Clinical decision support using data mining techniques offers more intelligent way to reduce the decision error in the last few years. However, clinical datasets often suffer from high missingness, which adversely impacts the quality of modelling if handled improperly. Imputing missing values provides an opportunity to resolve the issue. Conventional imputation methods adopt simple statistical analysis, such as mean imputation or discarding missing cases, which have many limitations and thus degrade the performance of learning. This study examines a series of machine learning based imputation methods and suggests an efficient approach to in preparing a good quality breast cancer (BC) dataset, to find the relationship between BC treatment and chemotherapy-related amenorrhoea, where the performance is evaluated with the accuracy of the prediction. To this end, the reliability and robustness of six well-known imputation methods are evaluated. Our results show that imputation leads to a significant boost in the classification performance compared to the model prediction based on listwise deletion. Furthermore, the results reveal that most methods gain strong robustness and discriminant power even the dataset experiences high missing rate (> 50%).

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Funding

This work is fully funded by Melbourne Research Scholarships (MRS), Grant No. 385545 and partially supported by Fertility After Cancer Predictor (FoRECAsT) Study. Michelle Peate is currently supported by an MDHS Fellowship, University of Melbourne. The FoRECAsT study is supported by the FoRECAsT consortium and Victorian Government through a Victorian Cancer Agency (Early Career Seed Grant) awarded to Michelle Peate.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia

    Xuetong Wu, Hadi Akbarzadeh Khorshidi & Uwe Aickelin

  2. Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia

    Zobaida Edib & Michelle Peate

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  1. Xuetong Wu
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  2. Hadi Akbarzadeh Khorshidi
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  3. Uwe Aickelin
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  4. Zobaida Edib
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  5. Michelle Peate
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Correspondence to Xuetong Wu.

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Wu, X., Akbarzadeh Khorshidi, H., Aickelin, U. et al. Imputation techniques on missing values in breast cancer treatment and fertility data. Health Inf Sci Syst 7, 19 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13755-019-0082-4

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