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Abstract - ImputeViz: A Visual Analytics Dashboard for Diagnosing Missing Data and Comparing Imputation Methods
Missing data is a persistent obstacle in scientific, social science, and public health research, often biasing analyses and placing accountability on analysts for how they handle missing values. We introduce ImputeViz, an integrated visual analytics dashboard that supports diagnosing missingness, configuring imputation models, and evaluating results. The system brings together widely used methods, including MICE, Random Forest, XGBoost, and kNN, within an interactive environment that makes missingness patterns explicit. To support geospatial reasoning, we introduce gKNN, a geographically informed kNN variant that blends socioeconomic and spatial distances and exposes donor contributions, enabling provenance-based visual accountability by showing which regions drive each estimate. Our primary contribution is a method-agnostic visual analytics environment that makes cross-method comparison a first-class visual task and integrates gKNN alongside standard methods. Coordinated views reveal missingness structure through heatmaps, co-missingness summaries, and distributional diagnostics that help analysts reason about missingness patterns (MCAR/MAR) and cases where missingness may be non-random (MNAR). Users can compare and tune models and interrogate results via distributional overlays, a Method Comparison Summary reporting MAE, RMSE, Delta RMSE, and runtime for each algorithm on the current target and mask, along with variable-level discrepancy views. Cached per-method results and locked axis scales reduce cognitive overhead from shifting ranges during method switching. These comparisons highlight where methods disagree, which variables are sensitive, and how imputation choices affect downstream summaries. Case studies demonstrate how ImputeViz helps analysts select effective strategies, surface sensitive variables, and assess model robustness.
ImputeViz:用于诊断缺失数据并比较插补方法的可视化分析仪表盘 /
ImputeViz: A Visual Analytics Dashboard for Diagnosing Missing Data and Comparing Imputation Methods
1️⃣ 一句话总结
本文介绍了一个名为ImputeViz的可视化分析工具,它通过交互式图表帮助研究人员直观地发现数据缺失的模式、选择和调整多种插补方法(如MICE、随机森林、XGBoost、kNN),并能清晰对比不同方法的补全效果,从而让非技术用户也能做出更可靠的数据分析决策。