• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.21 no.11
• /
• pp.135-144
• /
• 2021

Recently, data-driven decision-making technology has become a key technology leading the data industry, and machine learning technology for this requires high-quality training datasets. However, real-world data contains missing values for various reasons, which degrades the performance of prediction models learned from the poor training data. Therefore, in order to build a high-performance model from real-world datasets, many studies on automatically imputing missing values in initial training data have been actively conducted. Many of conventional machine learning-based imputation techniques for handling missing data involve very time-consuming and cumbersome work because they are applied only to numeric type of columns or create individual predictive models for each columns. Therefore, this paper proposes a new data imputation technique called 'Denoising Self-Attention Network (DSAN)', which can be applied to mixed-type dataset containing both numerical and categorical columns. DSAN can learn robust feature expression vectors by combining self-attention and denoising techniques, and can automatically interpolate multiple missing variables in parallel through multi-task learning. To verify the validity of the proposed technique, data imputation experiments has been performed after arbitrarily generating missing values for several mixed-type training data. Then we show the validity of the proposed technique by comparing the performance of the binary classification models trained on imputed data together with the errors between the original and imputed values.