Machine Learning for incomplete data

Abstract

Methods based on basis functions (such as the sigmoid and q-Gaussian functions) and similarity measures (such as distances or kernel functions) are widely used in machine learning and related fields. These methods often take for granted that data is fully observed and are not equipped to handle incomplete data in an organic manner. This assumption is often flawed, as incomplete data is a fact in various domains such as medical diagnosis and sensor analytics. Therefore, one might find it useful to be able to estimate the value of these functions in the presence of partially observed data. We propose methodologies to estimate the Gaussian Kernel, the Euclidean Distance, the Epanechnikov kernel and arbitrary basis functions in the presence of possibly incomplete feature vectors. To obtain such estimates, the incomplete feature vectors are treated as continuous random variables and, based on that, we take the expected value of the transforms of interest.