Multi-task Neural Networks for Dealing with Missing Inputs

摘要

Incomplete data is a common drawback in many pattern classification applications. A classical way to deal with unknown values is missing data estimation. Most machine learning techniques work well with missing values, but they do not focus the missing data estimation to solve the classification task. This paper1 presents effective neural network approaches based on Multi-Task Learning (MTL) for pattern classification with missing inputs. These MTL networks are compared with representative procedures used for handling incomplete data on two well-known data sets. The experimental results show the superiority of our approaches with respect to alternative techniques.