Fifth International Conference on Hybrid Intelligent Systems (HIS'05)
Incorporating an EM-Approach for Handling Missing Attribute-Values in Decision Tree Induction
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
December 06-December 09
ISBN: 0-7695-2457-5
Data with missing attribute-values are quite common in many classification problems. In this paper, we incorporate an Expectation-Maximization(EM) inspired approach for filling up missing values to decision tree learning with the objective of improving classification accuracy. Here, each missing attribute-value is iteratively filled using a predictor constructed from the known values and predicted values of the missing attribute-values from the previous iteration. We show that our approach significantly outperforms some standard machine learning methods for handling missing values in classification tasks.