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Hauptverfasser: Sun, Siyi, Selby, David Antony, Huang, Yunchuan, Vollmer, Sebastian, Flaxman, Seth, Calinescu, Anisoara
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08844
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author Sun, Siyi
Selby, David Antony
Huang, Yunchuan
Vollmer, Sebastian
Flaxman, Seth
Calinescu, Anisoara
author_facet Sun, Siyi
Selby, David Antony
Huang, Yunchuan
Vollmer, Sebastian
Flaxman, Seth
Calinescu, Anisoara
contents Missing data imputation in tabular datasets remains a pivotal challenge in data science and machine learning, particularly within socioeconomic research. However, real-world socioeconomic datasets are typically subject to strict data protection protocols, which often prohibit public sharing, even for synthetic derivatives. This severely limits the reproducibility and accessibility of benchmark studies in such settings. Further, there are very few publicly available synthetic datasets. Thus, there is limited availability of benchmarks for systematic evaluation of imputation methods on socioeconomic datasets, whether real or synthetic. In this study, we utilize the World Bank's publicly available synthetic dataset, Synthetic Data for an Imaginary Country, which closely mimics a real World Bank household survey while being fully public, enabling broad access for methodological research. With this as a starting point, we derived the IMAGIC-500 dataset: we select a subset of 500k individuals across approximately 100k households with 19 socioeconomic features, designed to reflect the hierarchical structure of real-world household surveys. This paper introduces a comprehensive missing data imputation benchmark on IMAGIC-500 under various missing mechanisms (MCAR, MAR, MNAR) and missingness ratios (10\%, 20\%, 30\%, 40\%, 50\%). Our evaluation considers the imputation accuracy for continuous and categorical variables, computational efficiency, and impact on downstream predictive tasks, such as estimating educational attainment at the individual level. The results highlight the strengths and weaknesses of statistical, traditional machine learning, and deep learning imputation techniques, including recent diffusion-based methods. The IMAGIC-500 dataset and benchmark aim to facilitate the development of robust imputation algorithms and foster reproducible social science research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_08844
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle IMAGIC-500: IMputation benchmark on A Generative Imaginary Country (500k samples)
Sun, Siyi
Selby, David Antony
Huang, Yunchuan
Vollmer, Sebastian
Flaxman, Seth
Calinescu, Anisoara
Machine Learning
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Missing data imputation in tabular datasets remains a pivotal challenge in data science and machine learning, particularly within socioeconomic research. However, real-world socioeconomic datasets are typically subject to strict data protection protocols, which often prohibit public sharing, even for synthetic derivatives. This severely limits the reproducibility and accessibility of benchmark studies in such settings. Further, there are very few publicly available synthetic datasets. Thus, there is limited availability of benchmarks for systematic evaluation of imputation methods on socioeconomic datasets, whether real or synthetic. In this study, we utilize the World Bank's publicly available synthetic dataset, Synthetic Data for an Imaginary Country, which closely mimics a real World Bank household survey while being fully public, enabling broad access for methodological research. With this as a starting point, we derived the IMAGIC-500 dataset: we select a subset of 500k individuals across approximately 100k households with 19 socioeconomic features, designed to reflect the hierarchical structure of real-world household surveys. This paper introduces a comprehensive missing data imputation benchmark on IMAGIC-500 under various missing mechanisms (MCAR, MAR, MNAR) and missingness ratios (10\%, 20\%, 30\%, 40\%, 50\%). Our evaluation considers the imputation accuracy for continuous and categorical variables, computational efficiency, and impact on downstream predictive tasks, such as estimating educational attainment at the individual level. The results highlight the strengths and weaknesses of statistical, traditional machine learning, and deep learning imputation techniques, including recent diffusion-based methods. The IMAGIC-500 dataset and benchmark aim to facilitate the development of robust imputation algorithms and foster reproducible social science research.
title IMAGIC-500: IMputation benchmark on A Generative Imaginary Country (500k samples)
topic Machine Learning
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08844