To Measure What Isn't There -- Visual Exploration of Missingness Structures Using Quality Metrics

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Fernstad, Sara Johansson, Alsufyani, Sarah, Del Din, Silvia, Yarnall, Alison, Rochester, Lynn
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913866042048512
author Fernstad, Sara Johansson
Alsufyani, Sarah
Del Din, Silvia
Yarnall, Alison
Rochester, Lynn
author_facet Fernstad, Sara Johansson
Alsufyani, Sarah
Del Din, Silvia
Yarnall, Alison
Rochester, Lynn
contents This paper contributes a set of quality metrics for identification and visual analysis of structured missingness in high-dimensional data. Missing values in data are a frequent challenge in most data generating domains and may cause a range of analysis issues. Structural missingness in data may indicate issues in data collection and pre-processing, but may also highlight important data characteristics. While research into statistical methods for dealing with missing data are mainly focusing on replacing missing values with plausible estimated values, visualization has great potential to support a more in-depth understanding of missingness structures in data. Nonetheless, while the interest in missing data visualization has increased in the last decade, it is still a relatively overlooked research topic with a comparably small number of publications, few of which address scalability issues. Efficient visual analysis approaches are needed to enable exploration of missingness structures in large and high-dimensional data, and to support informed decision-making in context of potential data quality issues. This paper suggests a set of quality metrics for identification of patterns of interest for understanding of structural missingness in data. These quality metrics can be used as guidance in visual analysis, as demonstrated through a use case exploring structural missingness in data from a real-life walking monitoring study. All supplemental materials for this paper are available at https://doi.org/10.25405/data.ncl.c.7741829.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_23447
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle To Measure What Isn't There -- Visual Exploration of Missingness Structures Using Quality Metrics
Fernstad, Sara Johansson
Alsufyani, Sarah
Del Din, Silvia
Yarnall, Alison
Rochester, Lynn
Graphics
Human-Computer Interaction
This paper contributes a set of quality metrics for identification and visual analysis of structured missingness in high-dimensional data. Missing values in data are a frequent challenge in most data generating domains and may cause a range of analysis issues. Structural missingness in data may indicate issues in data collection and pre-processing, but may also highlight important data characteristics. While research into statistical methods for dealing with missing data are mainly focusing on replacing missing values with plausible estimated values, visualization has great potential to support a more in-depth understanding of missingness structures in data. Nonetheless, while the interest in missing data visualization has increased in the last decade, it is still a relatively overlooked research topic with a comparably small number of publications, few of which address scalability issues. Efficient visual analysis approaches are needed to enable exploration of missingness structures in large and high-dimensional data, and to support informed decision-making in context of potential data quality issues. This paper suggests a set of quality metrics for identification of patterns of interest for understanding of structural missingness in data. These quality metrics can be used as guidance in visual analysis, as demonstrated through a use case exploring structural missingness in data from a real-life walking monitoring study. All supplemental materials for this paper are available at https://doi.org/10.25405/data.ncl.c.7741829.
title To Measure What Isn't There -- Visual Exploration of Missingness Structures Using Quality Metrics
topic Graphics
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23447