Applying data mining algorithms to inpatient dataset with missing values

摘要

Purpose - Data preparation plays an important role in data mining as most real life data sets contained missing data. This paper aims to investigate different treatment methods for missing data. Design/methodology/approach - This paper introduces, analyses and compares well-established treatment methods for missing data and proposes new methods based on naive Bayesian classifier. These methods have been implemented and compared using a real life geriatric hospital dataset. Findings - In the case where a large proportion of the data is missing and many attributes have missing data, treatment methods based on naive Bayesian classifier perform very well. Originality/value - This paper proposes an effective missing data treatment method and offers a viable approach to predict inpatient length of stay from a data set with many missing values.