Combining one-class classifiers to classify missing data

Abstract

In the paper a new method for handling with missing features values in classification is presented. The presented idea is to form an ensemble of one-class classifiers trained on each feature, preselected group of features or to compute from features a dissimilarity representation. Thus when any feature values are missing for a data point to be labeled, the ensemble can still make a reasonable decision based on the remaining classifiers. With the comparison to standard algorithms that handle with the missing features problem it is possible to build an ensemble that can classify test objects with all possible occurrence of missing features without retrain a classifier for each combination of missing features. Additionally, to train such an ensemble a training set does not need to be uncorrupted. The performance of the proposed ensemble is compared with standard methods use with missing features values problem on several UCI datasets. © Springer-Verlag 2004.