Abstract
In missing data contexts, k-nearest neighbours imputation has proven beneficial since it takes advantage of the similarity between patterns to replace missing values. When dealing with heterogeneous data, researchers traditionally apply the HEOM distance, that handles continuous, nominal and missing data. Although other heterogeneous distances have been proposed, they have not yet been investigated and compared for k-nearest neighbours imputation. In this work, we study the effect of several heterogeneous distances on k-nearest neighbours imputation on a large benchmark of publicly-available datasets.

Abstract
In healthcare domains, dealing with missing data is crucial since absent observations compromise the reliability of decision support models. K-nearest neighbours imputation has proven beneficial since it takes advantage of the similarity between patients to replace missing values. Nevertheless, its performance largely depends on the distance function used to evaluate such similarity. In the literature, k-nearest neighbours imputation frequently neglects the nature of data or performs feature transformation, whereas in this work, we study the impact of different heterogeneous distance functions on k-nearest neighbour imputation for biomedical datasets. Our results show that distance functions considerably impact the performance of classifiers learned from the imputed data, especially when data is complex.

Abstract
Although cross-validation is a standard procedure for performance evaluation, its joint application with oversampling remains an open question for researchers farther from the imbalanced data topic. A frequent experimental flaw is the application of oversampling algorithms to the entire dataset, resulting in biased models and overly-optimistic estimates. We emphasize and distinguish overoptimism from overfitting, showing that the former is associated with the cross-validation procedure, while the latter is influenced by the chosen oversampling algorithm. Furthermore, we perform a thorough empirical comparison of well-established oversampling algorithms, supported by a data complexity analysis. The best oversampling techniques seem to possess three key characteristics: use of cleaning procedures, cluster-based example synthetization and adaptive weighting of minority examples, where Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique coupled with Tomek Links and Majority Weighted Minority Oversampling Technique stand out, being capable of increasing the discriminative power of data.

Abstract
In data imputation problems, researchers typically use several techniques, individually or in combination, in order to find the one that presents the best performance over all the features comprised in the dataset. This strategy, however, neglects the nature of data (data distribution) and makes impractical the generalisation of the findings, since for new datasets, a huge number of new, time consuming experiments need to be performed. To overcome this issue, this work aims to understand the relationship between data distribution and the performance of standard imputation techniques, providing a heuristic on the choice of proper imputation methods and avoiding the needs to test a large set of methods. To this end, several datasets were selected considering different sample sizes, number of features, distributions and contexts and missing values were inserted at different percentages and scenarios. Then, different imputation methods were evaluated in terms of predictive and distributional accuracy. Our findings show that there is a relationship between features’ distribution and algorithms’ performance, and that their performance seems to be affected by the combination of missing rate and scenario at state and also other less obvious factors such as sample size, goodness-of-fit of features and the ratio between the number of features and the different distributions comprised in the dataset. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018.

Abstract
This work performs an in-depth study of the impact of distance functions on K-Nearest Neighbours imputation of heterogeneous datasets. Missing data is generated at several percentages, on a large benchmark of 150 datasets (50 continuous, 50 categorical and 50 heterogeneous datasets) and data imputation is performed using different distance functions (HEOM, HEOM-R, HVDM, HVDM-R, HVDM-S, MDE and SIMDIST) and k values (1, 3, 5 and 7). The impact of distance functions on kNN imputation is then evaluated in terms of classification performance, through the analysis of a classifier learned from the imputed data, and in terms of imputation quality, where the quality of the reconstruction of the original values is assessed. By analysing the properties of heterogeneous distance functions over continuous and categorical datasets individually, we then study their behaviour over heterogeneous data. We discuss whether datasets with different natures may benefit from different distance functions and to what extent the component of a distance function that deals with missing values influences such choice. Our experiments show that missing data has a significant impact on distance computation and the obtained results provide guidelines on how to choose appropriate distance functions depending on data characteristics (continuous, categorical or heterogeneous datasets) and the objective of the study (classification or imputation tasks).

Abstract
The performance evaluation of imputation algorithms often involves the generation of missing values. Missing values can be inserted in only one feature (univariate configuration) or in several features (multivariate configuration) at different percentages (missing rates) and according to distinct missing mechanisms, namely, missing completely at random, missing at random, and missing not at random. Since the missing data generation process defines the basis for the imputation experiments (configuration, missing rate, and missing mechanism), it is essential that it is appropriately applied; otherwise, conclusions derived from ill-defined setups may be invalid. The goal of this paper is to review the different approaches to synthetic missing data generation found in the literature and discuss their practical details, elaborating on their strengths and weaknesses. Our analysis revealed that creating missing at random and missing not at random scenarios in datasets comprising qualitative features is the most challenging issue in the related work and, therefore, should be the focus of future work in the field.