# PROMISSING: Pruning Missing Values in Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.01640 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01640/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Explaining Machine Learning Classifiers through Diverse Counterfactual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07697/) (2019)
- [OpenML: networked science in machine learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1407.7722/) (2014)
- [GAIN: Missing Data Imputation using Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02920/) (2018)
- [Handling Incomplete Heterogeneous Data using VAEs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03653/) (2018)
- [not-MIWAE: Deep Generative Modelling with Missing not at Random Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12871/) (2020)
- [What's a good imputation to predict with missing values?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00311/) (2021)
- [On the consistency of supervised learning with missing values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06931/) (2019)
- [Processing of missing data by neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07405/) (2018)
- [VAEs in the Presence of Missing Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05301/) (2020)
- [NeuMiss networks: differentiable programming for supervised learning with missing values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01627/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [HgbNet: predicting hemoglobin level/anemia degree from EHR data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12002/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While data are the primary fuel for machine learning models, they often suffer from missing values, especially when collected in real-world scenarios. However, many off-the-shelf machine learning models, including artificial neural network models, are unable to handle these missing values directly. Therefore, extra data preprocessing and curation steps, such as data imputation, are inevitable before learning and prediction processes. In this study, we propose a simple and intuitive yet effective method for pruning missing values (PROMISSING) during learning and inference steps in neural networks. In this method, there is no need to remove or impute the missing values; instead, the missing values are treated as a new source of information (representing what we do not know). Our experiments on simulated data, several classification and regression benchmarks, and a multi-modal clinical dataset show that PROMISSING results in similar prediction performance compared to various imputation techniques. In addition, our experiments show models trained using PROMISSING techniques are becoming less decisive in their predictions when facing incomplete samples with many unknowns. This finding hopefully advances machine learning models from being pure predicting machines to more realistic thinkers that can also say "I do not know" when facing incomplete sources of information.