Methodologies for Imputation of Missing Values in Rice Pest Data

Abstract

Data Mining is an emerging research field in the analysis of agricultural data. In fact the most important problem in extracting knowledge from the agriculture data is the missing values of the attributes in the selected data set. If such deficiencies are there in the selected data set then it needs to be cleaned during preprocessing of the data in order to obtain a functional data. The main objective of this paper is to analyse the effectiveness of the various imputation methods in producing a complete data set that can be more useful for applying data mining techniques and presented a comparative analysis of the imputation methods for handling missing values. The pest data set of rice crop collected throughout Maharashtra state under Crop Pest Surveillance and Advisory Project (CROPSAP) during 2009-2013 was used for analysis. The different methodologies like Deleting of rows, Mean & Median, Linear regression and Predictive Mean Matching were analysed for Imputation of Missing values. The comparative analysis shows that Predictive Mean Matching Methodology was better than other methods and effective for imputation of missing values in large data set.