Sparse Data Reconstruction, Missing Value and Multiple Imputation through Matrix Factorization
Abstract
Social science approaches to missing values predict avoided, unrequested, or lost information from dense data sets, typically surveys. The authors propose a matrix factorization approach to missing data imputation that (1) identifies underlying factors to model similarities across respondents and responses and (2) regularizes across factors to reduce their overinfluence for optimal data reconstruction. This approach may enable social scientists to draw new conclusions from sparse data sets with a large number of features, for example, historical or archival sources, online surveys with high attrition rates, or data sets created from Web scraping, which confound traditional imputation techniques. The authors introduce matrix factorization techniques and detail their probabilistic interpretation, and they demonstrate these techniques’ consistency with Rubin’s multiple imputation framework. The authors show via simulations using artificial data and data from real-world subsets of the General Social Survey and National Longitudinal Study of Youth cases for which matrix factorization techniques may be preferred. These findings recommend the use of matrix factorization for data reconstruction in several settings, particularly when data are Boolean and categorical and when large proportions of the data are missing.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Oct 22, 2022
- Source ID
- 10.1177/00811750221125799
Entities
People
- James A. Evans
- Madeleine Udell
- Nandana Sengupta
- Nathan Srebro
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Canadian Institutes of Health Research
- Cornell University
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- Indian Institutes of Technology
- National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics
- National Science Foundation
- Santa Fe Institute
- University of Chicago