I am working with a data-set of patient information and trying to calculate the Propensity Score from the data using MATLAB. After removing features with many missing values, I am still left with several missing (NaN) values.
I get errors due to these missing values, as the values of my cost-function and gradient vector become NaN, when I try to perform logistic regression using the following Matlab code (from Andrew Ng's Coursera Machine Learning class) :
[m, n] = size(X);
X = [ones(m, 1) X];
initial_theta = ones(n+1, 1);
[cost, grad] = costFunction(initial_theta, X, y);
options = optimset('GradObj', 'on', 'MaxIter', 400);
[theta, cost] = ...
fminunc(@(t)(costFunction(t, X, y)), initial_theta, options);
Note: sigmoid and costfunction are working functions I created for overall ease of use.
The calculations can be performed smoothly if I replace all NaN values with 1 or 0. However I am not sure if that is the best way to deal with this issue, and I was also wondering what replacement value I should pick (in general) to get the best results for performing logistic regression with missing data. Are there any benefits/drawbacks to using a particular number (0 or 1 or something else) for replacing the said missing values in my data?
Note: I have also normalized all feature values to be in the range of 0-1.
Any insight on this issue will be highly appreciated. Thank you
As pointed out earlier, this is a generic problem people deal with regardless of the programming platform. It is called "missing data imputation".
Enforcing all missing values to a particular number certainly has drawbacks. Depending on the distribution of your data it can be drastic, for example, setting all missing values to 1 in a binary sparse data having more zeroes than ones.
Fortunately, MATLAB has a function called knnimpute that estimates a missing data point by its closest neighbor.
From my experience, I often found knnimpute useful. However, it may fall short when there are too many missing sites as in your data; the neighbors of a missing site may be incomplete as well, thereby leading to inaccurate estimation. Below, I figured out a walk-around solution to that; it begins with imputing the least incomplete columns, (optionally) imposing a safe predefined distance for the neighbors. I hope this helps.
function data = dnnimpute(data,distCutoff,option,distMetric)
% data = dnnimpute(data,distCutoff,option,distMetric)
%
% Distance-based nearest neighbor imputation that impose a distance
% cutoff to determine nearest neighbors, i.e., avoids those samples
% that are more distant than the distCutoff argument.
%
% Imputes missing data coded by "NaN" starting from the covarites
% (columns) with the least number of missing data. Then it continues by
% including more (complete) covariates in the calculation of pair-wise
% distances.
%
% option,
% 'median' - Median of the nearest neighboring values
% 'weighted' - Weighted average of the nearest neighboring values
% 'default' - Unweighted average of the nearest neighboring values
%
% distMetric,
% 'euclidean' - Euclidean distance (default)
% 'seuclidean' - Standardized Euclidean distance. Each coordinate
% difference between rows in X is scaled by dividing
% by the corresponding element of the standard
% deviation S=NANSTD(X). To specify another value for
% S, use D=pdist(X,'seuclidean',S).
% 'cityblock' - City Block distance
% 'minkowski' - Minkowski distance. The default exponent is 2. To
% specify a different exponent, use
% D = pdist(X,'minkowski',P), where the exponent P is
% a scalar positive value.
% 'chebychev' - Chebychev distance (maximum coordinate difference)
% 'mahalanobis' - Mahalanobis distance, using the sample covariance
% of X as computed by NANCOV. To compute the distance
% with a different covariance, use
% D = pdist(X,'mahalanobis',C), where the matrix C
% is symmetric and positive definite.
% 'cosine' - One minus the cosine of the included angle
% between observations (treated as vectors)
% 'correlation' - One minus the sample linear correlation between
% observations (treated as sequences of values).
% 'spearman' - One minus the sample Spearman's rank correlation
% between observations (treated as sequences of values).
% 'hamming' - Hamming distance, percentage of coordinates
% that differ
% 'jaccard' - One minus the Jaccard coefficient, the
% percentage of nonzero coordinates that differ
% function - A distance function specified using @, for
% example @DISTFUN.
%
if nargin < 3
option = 'mean';
end
if nargin < 4
distMetric = 'euclidean';
end
nanVals = isnan(data);
nanValsPerCov = sum(nanVals,1);
noNansCov = nanValsPerCov == 0;
if isempty(find(noNansCov, 1))
[~,leastNans] = min(nanValsPerCov);
noNansCov(leastNans) = true;
first = data(nanVals(:,noNansCov),:);
nanRows = find(nanVals(:,noNansCov)==true); i = 1;
for row = first'
data(nanRows(i),noNansCov) = mean(row(~isnan(row)));
i = i+1;
end
end
nSamples = size(data,1);
if nargin < 2
dataNoNans = data(:,noNansCov);
distances = pdist(dataNoNans);
distCutoff = min(distances);
end
[stdCovMissDat,idxCovMissDat] = sort(nanValsPerCov,'ascend');
imputeCols = idxCovMissDat(stdCovMissDat>0);
% Impute starting from the cols (covariates) with the least number of
% missing data.
for c = reshape(imputeCols,1,length(imputeCols))
imputeRows = 1:nSamples;
imputeRows = imputeRows(nanVals(:,c));
for r = reshape(imputeRows,1,length(imputeRows))
% Calculate distances
distR = inf(nSamples,1);
%
noNansCov_r = find(isnan(data(r,:))==0);
noNansCov_r = noNansCov_r(sum(isnan(data(nanVals(:,c)'==false,~isnan(data(r,:)))),1)==0);
%
for i = find(nanVals(:,c)'==false)
distR(i) = pdist([data(r,noNansCov_r); data(i,noNansCov_r)],distMetric);
end
tmp = min(distR(distR>0));
% Impute the missing data at sample r of covariate c
switch option
case 'weighted'
data(r,c) = (1./distR(distR<=max(distCutoff,tmp)))' * data(distR<=max(distCutoff,tmp),c) / sum(1./distR(distR<=max(distCutoff,tmp)));
case 'median'
data(r,c) = median(data(distR<=max(distCutoff,tmp),c),1);
case 'mean'
data(r,c) = mean(data(distR<=max(distCutoff,tmp),c),1);
end
% The missing data in sample r is imputed. Update the sample
% indices of c which are imputed.
nanVals(r,c) = false;
end
fprintf('%u/%u of the covariates are imputed.\n',find(c==imputeCols),length(imputeCols));
end