Statistical Inference for Regression with Imputed Binary Covariates with Application to Emotion Recognition

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel statistical method for imputing missing binary covariates in emotion recognition data, leveraging auxiliary features and small pilot samples to improve inference accuracy in large-scale streaming studies.

Contribution

The paper develops a new imputation and inference procedure for partially observed binary data using auxiliary features and small pilot samples, with proven asymptotic properties.

Findings

Method improves statistical efficiency over pilot-only analysis

Simulation results confirm theoretical properties and effectiveness

Application to real streaming data demonstrates practical benefits

Abstract

In the flourishing live streaming industry, accurate recognition of streamers' emotions has become a critical research focus, with profound implications for audience engagement and content optimization. However, precise emotion coding typically requires manual annotation by trained experts, making it extremely expensive and time-consuming to obtain complete observational data for large-scale studies. Motivated by this challenge in streamer emotion recognition, we develop here a novel imputation method together with a principled statistical inference procedure for analyzing partially observed binary data. Specifically, we assume for each observation an auxiliary feature vector, which is sufficiently cheap to be fully collected for the whole sample. We next assume a small pilot sample with both the target binary covariates (i.e., the emotion status) and the auxiliary features fully observed, of which the size could be considerably smaller than that of the whole sample. Thereafter, a regression model can be constructed for the target binary covariates and the auxiliary features. This enables us to impute the missing binary features using the fully observed auxiliary features for the entire sample. We establish the associated asymptotic theory for principled statistical inference and present extensive simulation experiments, demonstrating the effectiveness and theoretical soundness of our proposed method. Furthermore, we validate our approach using a comprehensive dataset on emotion recognition in live streaming, demonstrating that our imputation method yields smaller standard errors and is more statistically efficient than using pilot data only. Our findings have significant implications for enhancing user experience and optimizing engagement on streaming platforms.