Paper ID: 2304.01429

Learning from data with structured missingness

Robin Mitra, Sarah F. McGough, Tapabrata Chakraborti, Chris Holmes, Ryan Copping, Niels Hagenbuch, Stefanie Biedermann, Jack Noonan, Brieuc Lehmann, Aditi Shenvi, Xuan Vinh Doan, David Leslie, Ginestra Bianconi, Ruben Sanchez-Garcia, Alisha Davies, Maxine Mackintosh, Eleni-Rosalina Andrinopoulou, Anahid Basiri, Chris Harbron, Ben D. MacArthur

Missing data are an unavoidable complication in many machine learning tasks. When data are `missing at random' there exist a range of tools and techniques to deal with the issue. However, as machine learning studies become more ambitious, and seek to learn from ever-larger volumes of heterogeneous data, an increasingly encountered problem arises in which missing values exhibit an association or structure, either explicitly or implicitly. Such `structured missingness' raises a range of challenges that have not yet been systematically addressed, and presents a fundamental hindrance to machine learning at scale. Here, we outline the current literature and propose a set of grand challenges in learning from data with structured missingness.

Submitted: Apr 4, 2023