Missing Value Imputation With Adversarial Random Forests— <scp>MissARF</scp>
Handling missing values is a common challenge in biostatistical analyses, typically addressed by imputation methods. We propose a novel, fast, and easy-to-use imputation method called missing value imputation with adversarial random forests (MissARF), based on generative machine learning, that provides both single and multiple imputation. MissARF employs adversarial random forest (ARF) for density estimation and data synthesis. To impute a missing value of an observation, we condition on the non-missing values and sample from the estimated conditional distribution generated by ARF. Our experiments demonstrate that MissARF performs comparably to state-of-the-art single and multiple imputation methods in terms of imputation quality and fast runtime with no additional costs for multiple imputation.
Authors
- Jan Kapar (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-6408-2840)
- David Watson (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9632-2159)
- Pegah Golchian
- Marvin N. Wright
Institutions
- University of Copenhagen (DK)
- University of Bremen (DE)
- King's College London (GB)
- Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology - BIPS (DE)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Statistics in Medicine
- Published
- 2026-02-01
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1002/sim.70379
- Primary Topic
- Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- Freie Hansestadt Bremen
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft