Trinary Decision Trees for handling missing data
Henning Zakrisson

TL;DR
This paper presents the Trinary decision tree, a new algorithm for handling missing data in decision trees that performs well in MCAR scenarios and introduces a hybrid model for broader robustness.
Contribution
The paper introduces the Trinary decision tree and a hybrid TrinaryMIA model, advancing missing data handling without assuming missingness contains information.
Findings
Outperforms in MCAR missing data scenarios
Lags behind in Informative Missingness (IM) scenarios
Hybrid TrinaryMIA model is robust across missing data types
Abstract
This paper introduces the Trinary decision tree, an algorithm designed to improve the handling of missing data in decision tree regressors and classifiers. Unlike other approaches, the Trinary decision tree does not assume that missing values contain any information about the response. Both theoretical calculations on estimator bias and numerical illustrations using real data sets are presented to compare its performance with established algorithms in different missing data scenarios (Missing Completely at Random (MCAR), and Informative Missingness (IM)). Notably, the Trinary tree outperforms its peers in MCAR settings, especially when data is only missing out-of-sample, while lacking behind in IM settings. A hybrid model, the TrinaryMIA tree, which combines the Trinary tree and the Missing In Attributes (MIA) approach, shows robust performance in all types of missingness. Despite the…
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Taxonomy
TopicsData Mining Algorithms and Applications · Bayesian Modeling and Causal Inference · Face and Expression Recognition
