Abstract
M.Sc. (Computer Science)
It is a well-known fact that the quality of the dataset plays a central role in the results and conclusions drawn from the analysis of such a dataset. As the saying goes, ”garbage in, garbage out”. In recent years, neural networks have displayed good performance in solving a diverse number of problems. Unfortunately, neural networks are not immune to this misfortune presented by missing values. Furthermore, in most real-world settings, it is often the case that, the only data available for training neural networks consists of missing values. In such cases, we are left with little choice but to use this data for the purposes of training neural networks, although doing so may result in a poorly trained neural network. Most systems currently in use- merely discard the missing observation from the training datasets, while others just proceed to use this data and ignore the problems presented by the missing values. Still other approaches choose to impute these missing values with fixed constants such as means and mode. Most neural network models work under the assumption that the supplied data contains no missing values. This dissertation explores a method for training neural networks in the event where the training dataset consists of missing values...