IRTCI: Item Response Theory for Categorical Imputation

TL;DR

This paper introduces IRTCI, a novel categorical imputation method based on item response theory, which outperforms several existing techniques across various datasets and missing data scenarios.

Contribution

The work presents a new IRT-based imputation approach and compares it against established methods like kNN, MICE, and Datawig, demonstrating its effectiveness.

Findings

IRT-based imputation outperforms several existing methods.

IRTCI performs well across ordinal, nominal, and binary data.

The method is robust to different missing data proportions and patterns.

Abstract

Most datasets suffer from partial or complete missing values, which has downstream limitations on the available models on which to test the data and on any statistical inferences that can be made from the data. Several imputation techniques have been designed to replace missing data with stand in values. The various approaches have implications for calculating clinical scores, model building and model testing. The work showcased here offers a novel means for categorical imputation based on item response theory (IRT) and compares it against several methodologies currently used in the machine learning field including k-nearest neighbors (kNN), multiple imputed chained equations (MICE) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) deep learning method, Datawig. Analyses comparing these techniques were performed on three different datasets that represented ordinal, nominal and binary categories. The data were modified so that they also varied on both the proportion of data missing and the systematization of the missing data. Two different assessments of performance were conducted: accuracy in reproducing the missing values, and predictive performance using the imputed data. Results demonstrated that the new method, Item Response Theory for Categorical Imputation (IRTCI), fared quite well compared to currently used methods, outperforming several of them in many conditions. Given the theoretical basis for the new approach, and the unique generation of probabilistic terms for determining category belonging for missing cells, IRTCI offers a viable alternative to current approaches.