QUIP: Query-driven Missing Value Imputation
Missing values widely exist in real-world data sets, and failure to clean the missing data may result in the poor quality of answers to queries. Traditionally, missing value imputation has been studied as an offline process as part of preparing data for analysis. This paper studies query-time missing value imputation and proposes QUIP, which only imputes minimal missing values to answer the query. Specifically, by taking a reasonable good query plan as input, QUIP tries to minimize the missing value imputation cost and query processing overhead. QUIP proposes a new implementation of outer join to preserve missing values in query processing and a bloom filter based index structure to optimize the space and runtime overhead. QUIP also designs a cost-based decision function to automatically guide each operator to impute missing values now or delay imputations. Efficient optimizations are proposed to speed-up aggregate operations in QUIP, such as MAX/MIN operator. Extensive experiments on both real and synthetic data sets demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of QUIP, which outperforms the state-of-the-art ImputeDB by 2 to 10 times on different query sets and data sets, and achieves the order-of-magnitudes improvement over the offline approach.
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