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Missing attribute values in medical datasets are one of the most common problems faced when mining medical datasets. Estimation of missing values is a major challenging task in pre-processing of datasets. Any wrong estimate of missing attribute values can lead to inefficient and improper classification thus resulting in lower classifier accuracies. Similarity measures play a key role during the imputation process. The use of an appropriate and better similarity measure can help to achieve better imputation and improved classification accuracies. This paper proposes a novel imputation measure for finding similarity between missing and non-missing instances in medical datasets. Experiments are carried by applying both the proposed imputation technique and popular benchmark existing imputation techniques. Classification is carried using KNN, J48, SMO and RBFN classifiers. Experiment analysis proved that after imputation of medical records using proposed imputation technique, the resulting classification accuracies reported by the classifiers KNN, J48 and SMO have improved when compared to other existing benchmark imputation techniques.
