Imputation of Medical Data Using Subspace Condition Order Degree Polynomials

Temporal medical data is often collected during patient treatments that require personal analysis. Each observation recorded in the temporal medical data is associated with measurements and time treatments. A major problem in the analysis of temporal medical data are the missing values that are caused, for example, by patients dropping out of a study before completion. Therefore, the imputation of missing data is an important step during pre-processing and can provide useful information before the data is mined. For each patient and each variable, this imputation replaces the missing data with a value drawn from an estimated distribution of that variable. In this paper, we propose a new method, called Newton's finite divided difference polynomial interpolation with condition order degree, for dealing with missing values in temporal medical data related to obesity. We compared the new imputation method with three existing subspace estimation techniques, including the k-nearest neighbor, local least squares, and natural cubic spline approaches. The performance of each approach was then evaluated by using the normalized root mean square error and the statistically significant test results. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed method provides the best fit with the smallest error and is more accurate than the other methods.