Missing nominal data imputation using association rule based on weighted voting method

With the rapid increase in the use of databases, missing data make up an important and unavoidable problem in data management and analysis. Because the mining of association rules can effectively establish the relationship among items in databases, therefore, discovered rules can be applied to predict the missing data. In this paper, we present a new method that uses association rules based on weighted voting to impute missing data. Three databases were used to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method. Experimental results prove that our method is feasible in some databases. Moreover, the proposed method was evaluated using five classification problems with two incomplete databases. Experimental results indicate that the accuracy of classification is increased when the proposed method is applied for missing attribute values imputation.