An Integrated Intuitionistic Fuzzy-Clustering Approach for Missing Data Imputation

Missing data imputation is a critical preprocessing task that directly impacts the quality and reliability of data-driven analyses, yet many existing methods treat numerical and categorical data separately and lack the integration of advanced techniques. We suggest a novel imputation technique to overcome these restrictions that synergistically combines regression imputation using HistGradientBoostingRegressor and fuzzy rule-based systems and is enhanced by a tailored clustering process. This integrated approach effectively handles mixed data types and complex data structures using regression models to predict missing numerical values, fuzzy logic to incorporate expert knowledge and interpretability, and clustering to capture latent data patterns. Categorical variables are managed by mode imputation and label encoding. We evaluated the method on twelve tabular datasets with artificially introduced missingness, employing a comprehensive set of metrics focused on originally missing entries. The results demonstrate that our iterative imputer performs competitively with other established imputation techniques, achieving better and comparable error rates and accuracy. By combining statistical learning with fuzzy and clustering frameworks, the method achieves 15% lower Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), 10% lower Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and 80% higher precision in UCI datasets, thus offering a promising advance in data preprocessing in practical applications.