Dimensionality reduction of vectors with null values

Question

I have vectors of same length where each entry can have the value 0, 1 or null.

V = {[0,1,1,1,null,0], [null,1,0,null,0,1], ...}

How can I perform a dimensionality reduction of these vectors into a lower dimensional space (in this case 2d)?

The simplest solution is to replace the null values by an outlier like -1. The dimensionality reduction will work well, but it will consider the null as closer to 0 than 1. If you want to separate null values even more, you can replace them by more extreme values like 10 or -10. — Nicolas Martin, Commented Aug 3, 2021 at 23:01

Brian Spiering · Accepted Answer · 2021-09-07 15:00:29Z

1

You have several options:

Drop rows that have null values.
Impute the null values.
Pick a dimensionality reduction algorithm that can handle null values. One example is NIPALS (Nonlinear Iterative Partial Least Squares) algorithm. That algorithm is discussed in "Multivariate Analysis of Quality: An Introduction" by Martens and Martens

answered Sep 7, 2021 at 15:00

Brian Spiering

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Echo9k · Accepted Answer · 2021-08-03 23:12:40Z

This is a data wrangling problem where you will need to experiment and it's even better if you know your data.

If you suspect that the null means 0 but the user just omitted it then replace it for zero.
If you can work with negative numbers replace the nulls with -1 as Nicolas mentioned unless -1 is a value that your numbers reach naturally.
If these nulls mean something important for your dataset you can create another column B where column A is null.
Another thing I can think of is that if you have categorical values, then you can one-hot-encode these columns.

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