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.

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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

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article

Missing Value Imputation With Adversarial Random Forests— MissARF

Jan Kapar, David Watson, Pegah Golchian, Marvin N. Wright
Statistics in Medicine
Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
article

Missing Value Imputation With Adversarial Random Forests— MissARF

Jan Kapar, David Watson, Pegah Golchian, Marvin N. Wright
article en

Abstract

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.

Statistics in MedicineVol. 45(3-5)
University of Copenhagen (DK), University of Bremen (DE), King's College London (GB), Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology - BIPS (DE)
Freie Hansestadt Bremen, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
Life in Land
Openalex Percentile: Top 68%
Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
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