# Towards Better Modeling with Missing Data: A Contrastive Learning-based Visual Analytics Perspective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.09744 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09744/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [What Makes for Good Views for Contrastive Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10243/) (2020)
- [Model-Contrastive Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16257/) (2021)
- [SphereFace: Deep Hypersphere Embedding for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08063/) (2017)
- [Self-supervised Learning: Generative or Contrastive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08218/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04592/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Data Augmentation Approaches for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03075/) (2021)
- [GAIN: Missing Data Imputation using Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02920/) (2018)
- [AutoInt: Automatic Feature Interaction Learning via Self-Attentive Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11921/) (2018)
- [Handling Missing Data with Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16418/) (2020)
- [Matrix Completion and Low-Rank SVD via Fast Alternating Least Squares](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.2596/) (2014)
- [Improved Embeddings with Easy Positive Triplet Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04370/) (2019)
- [How Does SimSiam Avoid Collapse Without Negative Samples? A Unified Understanding with Self-supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16262/) (2022)
- [Towards Better Analysis of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07043/) (2016)
- [Attention Flows: Analyzing and Comparing Attention Mechanisms in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07053/) (2020)
- [Understanding Hidden Memories of Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10777/) (2017)
- [Improving Contrastive Learning by Visualizing Feature Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02982/) (2021)
- [GAN Lab: Understanding Complex Deep Generative Models using Interactive Visual Experimentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01587/) (2018)
- [Contrastive Learning for Debiased Candidate Generation in Large-Scale Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12964/) (2020)
- [Processing of missing data by neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07405/) (2018)
- [VATLD: A Visual Analytics System to Assess, Understand and Improve Traffic Light Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12975/) (2020)
- [G-DetKD: Towards General Distillation Framework for Object Detectors via Contrastive and Semantic-guided Feature Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07482/) (2021)

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

- [Subspace Clustering on Incomplete Data with Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00262/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Missing data can pose a challenge for machine learning (ML) modeling. To address this, current approaches are categorized into feature imputation and label prediction and are primarily focused on handling missing data to enhance ML performance. These approaches rely on the observed data to estimate the missing values and therefore encounter three main shortcomings in imputation, including the need for different imputation methods for various missing data mechanisms, heavy dependence on the assumption of data distribution, and potential introduction of bias. This study proposes a Contrastive Learning (CL) framework to model observed data with missing values, where the ML model learns the similarity between an incomplete sample and its complete counterpart and the dissimilarity between other samples. Our proposed approach demonstrates the advantages of CL without requiring any imputation. To enhance interpretability, we introduce CIVis, a visual analytics system that incorporates interpretable techniques to visualize the learning process and diagnose the model status. Users can leverage their domain knowledge through interactive sampling to identify negative and positive pairs in CL. The output of CIVis is an optimized model that takes specified features and predicts downstream tasks. We provide two usage scenarios in regression and classification tasks and conduct quantitative experiments, expert interviews, and a qualitative user study to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. In short, this study offers a valuable contribution to addressing the challenges associated with ML modeling in the presence of missing data by providing a practical solution that achieves high predictive accuracy and model interpretability.