New approaches to missing biomedical data recovery for machine learning

• Published in: Journal of Engineering Science (Chişinău) Vol. 30; no. 1; pp. 106 - 117
• Main Authors: Iapăscurtă, Victor, Fiodorov, Ion
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Technical University of Moldova 15-04-2023
• Subjects: data recovery; machine learning; missing values; multimodal biomedical time series data; sepsis
• ISSN: 2587-3474; 2587-3482
• DOI: 10.52326/jes.utm.2023.30(1).09

Missing data is a common problem for medical data sets, especially large ones. This issue is of major importance since it can influence the analysis and further use of the data, e.g., for machine learning purposes. There are various methods for recovering missing data.One such method is to remove observations with missing values, but this is not very usefulgiven the limited amount of data available. Another commonly used approach is the LastObservation Carried Forward (LOCF). But most such methods are not universal and may needadjustments to the data set at hand. This article describes the possibility of solving thisproblem in the case of multimodal time series of biomedical data coming from patients withsepsis. It describes and compares three approaches tailored to a sepsis dataset, which isanalyzed and finally used to build a sepsis prediction system based on clinical data routinelyrecorded in an intensive care unit.