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Memory-Guided Trust-Region Bayesian Optimization (MG-TuRBO) for High Dimensions EngageTriBoost: Predictive Modeling of User Engagement in Digital Mental Health Intervention Using Explainable Machine Learning Reservoir observer enhanced with residual calibration and attention mechanism Efficient RL Training for LLMs with Experience Replay Wireless Communication Enhanced Value Decomposition for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Adversarial Sensor Errors for Safe and Robust Wind Turbine Fleet Control IKKA: Inversion Classification via Critical Anomalies for Robust Visual Servoing Adaptive Simulation Experiment for LLM Policy Optimization EvoLen: Evolution-Guided Tokenization for DNA Language Model Smartwatch-Based Sitting Time Estimation in Real-World Office Settings Structural Evaluation Metrics for SVG Generation via Leave-One-Out Analysis Loom: A Scalable Analytical Neural Computer Architecture Spectral Geometry of LoRA Adapters Encodes Training Objective and Predicts Harmful Compliance Finite-Sample Analysis of Nonlinear Independent Component Analysis:Sample Complexity and Identifiability Bounds How does Chain of Thought decompose complex tasks? Uncertainty-Aware Transformers: Conformal Prediction for Language Models Adaptive Candidate Point Thompson Sampling for High-Dimensional Bayesian Optimization Using Synthetic Data for Machine Learning-based Childhood Vaccination Prediction in Narok, Kenya Delve into the Applicability of Advanced Optimizers for Multi-Task Learning Bridging SFT and RL: Dynamic Policy Optimization for Robust Reasoning Multi-Agent Decision-Focused Learning via Value-Aware Sequential Communication Predictive Entropy Links Calibration and Paraphrase Sensitivity in Medical Vision-Language Models Efficient Hierarchical Implicit Flow Q-learning for Offline Goal-conditioned Reinforcement Learning Modality-Aware Zero-Shot Pruning and Sparse Attention for Efficient Multimodal Edge Inference The nextAI Solution to the NeurIPS 2023 LLM Efficiency Challenge Feature-Label Modal Alignment for Robust Partial Multi-Label Learning Integrated electro-optic attention nonlinearities for transformers Toward World Models for Epidemiology Tracing the Chain: Deep Learning for Stepping-Stone Intrusion Detection Batch Distillation Data for Developing Machine Learning Anomaly Detection Methods
Predicting missing values: A good idea?
Stef van Buuren · 2026-05-05 · via cs.LG updates on arXiv.org

Minimizing the Mean Squared Error (MSE) is a key objective in machine learning and is commonly used for imputing missing values. While this approach provides accurate point estimates, it introduces systematic biases in downstream analyses. These biases affect key parameters such as variance, prevalence, correlation, slope, and explained variance. The root cause is that imputed values optimized for MSE are averages, which reduce the natural variability in the data. This paper demonstrates that adding noise to imputed values can effectively eliminate these biases. The required noise level is proportional to the MSE. Using a toy example in a multivariate normal setting, we compare two methods: predictive imputation, which minimizes MSE, and stochastic imputation, which incorporates random noise. Simulation results show that predictive methods systematically introduce bias, while stochastic methods preserve the data's natural variability and produce unbiased estimates. We also evaluate three popular imputation tools -- missForest, softImpute, and mice -- and observe consistent biases in predictive methods. These findings highlight that MSE is an inadequate measure of imputation quality, as it prioritizes accuracy over variability. Incorporating noise into imputation methods is essential to prevent biases and ensure valid downstream analyses, underscoring the importance of stochastic approaches for handling incomplete data.