# Categorical EHR Imputation with Generative Adversarial Nets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.01701 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01701/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Wasserstein GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.07875/) (2017)
- [SeqGAN: Sequence Generative Adversarial Nets with Policy Gradient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05473/) (2016)
- [GAIN: Missing Data Imputation using Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02920/) (2018)
- [Real-valued (Medical) Time Series Generation with Recurrent Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02633/) (2017)
- [Learning from Simulated and Unsupervised Images through Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.07828/) (2016)
- [Generating Multi-label Discrete Patient Records using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06490/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Learning for Neural Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06547/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Feature Matching for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03850/) (2017)
- [GANS for Sequences of Discrete Elements with the Gumbel-softmax Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04051/) (2016)
- [Adversarial Generation of Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.10929/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [A review of Generative Adversarial Networks for Electronic Health Records: applications, evaluation measures and data sources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07018/) (2022)
- [Fairness in Missing Data Imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12002/) (2021)
- [Impact Of Missing Data Imputation On The Fairness And Accuracy Of Graph Node Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00783/) (2022)
- [Global Ease of Living Index: a machine learning framework for longitudinal analysis of major economies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06866/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Electronic Health Records often suffer from missing data, which poses a major problem in clinical practice and clinical studies. A novel approach for dealing with missing data are Generative Adversarial Nets (GANs), which have been generating huge research interest in image generation and transformation. Recently, researchers have attempted to apply GANs to missing data generation and imputation for EHR data: a major challenge here is the categorical nature of the data. State-of-the-art solutions to the GAN-based generation of categorical data involve either reinforcement learning, or learning a bidirectional mapping between the categorical and the real latent feature space, so that the GANs only need to generate real-valued features. However, these methods are designed to generate complete feature vectors instead of imputing only the subsets of missing features. In this paper we propose a simple and yet effective approach that is based on previous work on GANs for data imputation. We first motivate our solution by discussing the reason why adversarial training often fails in case of categorical features. Then we derive a novel way to re-code the categorical features to stabilize the adversarial training. Based on experiments on two real-world EHR data with multiple settings, we show that our imputation approach largely improves the prediction accuracy, compared to more traditional data imputation approaches.