scholarly journals Handling Complex Missing Data Using Random Forest Approach for an Air Quality Monitoring Dataset: A Case Study of Kuwait Environmental Data (2012 to 2018)

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 1333
Author(s):  
Ahmad R. Alsaber ◽  
Jiazhu Pan ◽  
Adeeba Al-Hurban 
Keyword(s):  
Air Quality ◽  
Missing Data ◽  
Random Forest ◽  
Missing Values ◽  
Imputation Method ◽  
Environmental Data ◽  
Environmental Research ◽  
Quality Data ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Air Quality Data

In environmental research, missing data are often a challenge for statistical modeling. This paper addressed some advanced techniques to deal with missing values in a data set measuring air quality using a multiple imputation (MI) approach. MCAR, MAR, and NMAR missing data techniques are applied to the data set. Five missing data levels are considered: 5%, 10%, 20%, 30%, and 40%. The imputation method used in this paper is an iterative imputation method, missForest, which is related to the random forest approach. Air quality data sets were gathered from five monitoring stations in Kuwait, aggregated to a daily basis. Logarithm transformation was carried out for all pollutant data, in order to normalize their distributions and to minimize skewness. We found high levels of missing values for NO2 (18.4%), CO (18.5%), PM10 (57.4%), SO2 (19.0%), and O3 (18.2%) data. Climatological data (i.e., air temperature, relative humidity, wind direction, and wind speed) were used as control variables for better estimation. The results show that the MAR technique had the lowest RMSE and MAE. We conclude that MI using the missForest approach has a high level of accuracy in estimating missing values. MissForest had the lowest imputation error (RMSE and MAE) among the other imputation methods and, thus, can be considered to be appropriate for analyzing air quality data.

scholarly journals Missing data exploration in air quality data set using R-package data visualisation tools

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 755-763
Author(s):  
Shamihah Muhammad Ghazali ◽  
Norshahida Shaadan ◽  
Zainura Idrus
Keyword(s):  
Air Quality ◽  
Missing Data ◽  
Missing Values ◽  
Missing At Random ◽  
Data Exploration ◽  
Quality Data ◽  
Gap Size ◽  
Data Visualisation ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Air Quality Data

Missing values often occur in many data sets of various research areas. This has been recognized as data quality problem because missing values could affect the performance of analysis results. To overcome the problem, the incomplete data set need to be treated or replaced using imputation method. Thus, exploring missing values pattern must be conducted beforehand to determine a suitable method. This paper discusses on the application of data visualisation as a smart technique for missing data exploration aiming to increase understanding on missing data behaviour which include missing data mechanism (MCAR, MAR and MNAR), distribution pattern of missingness in terms of percentage as well as the gap size. This paper presents the application of several data visualisation tools from five R-packges such as visdat, VIM, ggplot2, Amelia and UpSetR for data missingness exploration.  For an illustration, based on an air quality data set in Malaysia, several graphics were produced and discussed to illustrate the contribution of the visualisation tools in providing input and the insight on the pattern of data missingness. Based on the results, it is shown that missing values in air quality data set of the chosen sites in Malaysia behave as missing at random (MAR) with small percentage of missingness  and do contain long gap size of  missingness.

scholarly journals A Novel Method for Air Quality Data Imputation by Nuclear Norm Minimization

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaobo Chen ◽  
Yan Xiao
Keyword(s):  
Air Quality ◽  
Missing Values ◽  
Nuclear Norm ◽  
Quality Data ◽  
Data Imputation ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Nuclear Norm Minimization ◽  
Imputation Methods ◽  
Norm Minimization ◽  
Air Quality Data

Missing data is a frequently encountered problem in environment research community. To facilitate the analysis and management of air quality data, for example, PM2.5concentration in this study, a commonly adopted strategy for handling missing values in the samples is to generate a complete data set using imputation methods. Many imputation methods based on temporal or spatial correlation have been developed for this purpose in the existing literatures. The difference of various methods lies in characterizing the dependence relationship of data samples with different mathematical models, which is crucial for missing data imputation. In this paper, we propose two novel and principled imputation methods based on the nuclear norm of a matrix since it measures such dependence in a global fashion. The first method, termed as global nuclear norm minimization (GNNM), tries to impute missing values through directly minimizing the nuclear norm of the whole sample matrix, thus at the same time maximizing the linear dependence of samples. The second method, called local nuclear norm minimization (LNNM), concentrates more on each sample and its most similar samples which are estimated from the imputation results of the first method. In such a way, the nuclear norm minimization can be performed on those highly correlated samples instead of the whole sample matrix as in GNNM, thus reducing the adverse impact of irrelevant samples. The two methods are evaluated on a data set of PM2.5concentration measured every 1 h by 22 monitoring stations. The missing values are simulated with different percentages. The imputed values are compared with the ground truth values to evaluate the imputation performance of different methods. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of our methods, especially LNNM, for missing air quality data imputation.

scholarly journals A Comparison of Various Imputation Methods for Missing Values in Air Quality Data

2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 449-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nuryazmin Ahmat Zainuri ◽  
Abdul Aziz Jemain ◽  
Nora Muda
Keyword(s):  
Air Quality ◽  
Missing Values ◽  
Quality Data ◽  
Imputation Methods ◽  
Air Quality Data

Assessing the performance of standard methods to predict the standard uncertainty of air quality data having incomplete time coverage

2014 ◽  
Vol 16 (7) ◽  
pp. 1700-1704 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. C. Brown ◽  
Peter M. Harris ◽  
Maurice G. Cox
Keyword(s):  
Air Quality ◽  
Missing Data ◽  
Standard Uncertainty ◽  
Quality Data ◽  
Standard Methods ◽  
Air Quality Data

The validity of standardised equations to calculate the uncertainty arising from missing data during air quality studies is assessed.

scholarly journals Comparative Study of Three Imputation Methods to Treat Missing Values

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 2779-2786
Author(s):  
Rahul Singhai
Keyword(s):  
Data Mining ◽  
Missing Data ◽  
Missing Values ◽  
Learning Algorithm ◽  
Poor Quality ◽  
Imputation Method ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Imputation Methods ◽  
Missing Data Treatment

One relevant problem in data preprocessing is the presence of missing data that leads the poor quality of patterns, extracted after mining. Imputation is one of the widely used procedures that replace the missing values in a data set by some probable values. The advantage of this approach is that the missing data treatment is independent of the learning algorithm used. This allows the user to select the most suitable imputation method for each situation. This paper analyzes the various imputation methods proposed in the field of statistics with respect to data mining. A comparative analysis of three different imputation approaches which can be used to impute missing attribute values in data mining are given that shows the most promising method. An artificial input data (of numeric type) file of 1000 records is used to investigate the performance of these methods. For testing the significance of these methods Z-test approach were used.

scholarly journals A Comparative Study of Several EOF Based Imputation Methods for Long Gap Missing Values in a Single-Site Temporal Time Dependent (SSTTD) Air Quality (PM10) Dataset

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shamihah Muhammad Ghazali ◽  
Norshahida Shaadan ◽  
Zainura Idrus
Keyword(s):  
Air Quality ◽  
Missing Values ◽  
Single Site ◽  
Time Dependent ◽  
Environmental Research ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Imputation Methods ◽  
Long Gap ◽  
Expectation Maximisation ◽  
Gap Sequences

Missing values are often a major problem in many scientific fields of environmental research, leading to prediction inaccuracy and biased analysis results. This study compares the performance of existing Empirical Orthogonal Functions (EOF) based imputation methods. The EOF mean centred approach (EOF-mean) with several proposed EOF based methods, which include the EOF-median, EOF-trimmean and the newly applied Regularised Expectation-Maximisation Principal Component Analysis based method, namely R-EMPCA in estimating missing values for long gap sequence of missing values problem that exists in a Single Site Temporal Time-Dependent (SSTTD) multivariate structure air quality (PM10) data set. The study was conducted using real PM10 data set from the Klang air quality monitoring station. Performance assessment and evaluation of the methods were conducted via a simulation plan which was carried out according to four percentages (5, 10, 20 and 30) of missing values with respect to several long gap sequences (12, 24, 168 and 720) of missing points (hours). Based on several performance indicators such as RMSE, MAE, R-Square and AI, the results have shown that R-EMPCA outperformed the other methods. The results also conclude that the proposed EOF-median and EOF-trimmean have better performance than the existing EOF-mean based method in which EOF-trimmean is the best among the three. The methodology and findings of this study contribute as a solution to the problem of missing values with long gap sequences for the SSTTD data set.

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