Missing Data Workshop -- Final Announcement

[David B. Rosen]

This is the final email announcement (with updated list of presentations) for:

                       MISSING DATA: METHODS AND MODELS
                              A NIPS*95 Workshop
                           Friday, December 1, 1995


INTRODUCTION

Incomplete or missing data, typically unobserved or unavailable
features in supervised learning, is an important problem often
encountered in real-world data sets and applications.  Assumptions
about the missing-data mechanism are often not stated explicitly, for
example independence between this mechanism and the values of the
(missing or other) features themselves.  In the important case of
incomplete ~training~ data, one often discards incomplete rows or
columns of the data matrix, throwing out some useful information along
with the missing data.  Ad hoc or univariate methods such as imputing
the mean or mode are dangerous as they can sometimes give much worse
results than simple discarding.  Overcoming the problem of missing
data often requires that we model not just the dependence of the
output on the inputs, but the inputs among themselves as well.


THE WORKSHOP

This one-day workshop should provide a valuable opportunity to share
and discuss methods and models used for missing data.  The following
short talks will be presented, with questions and discussion following
each.

	o Leo Breiman, U.C. Berkeley 
	  Formal and ad hoc ways of handling missing data
	o Zoubin Ghahramani, U. Toronto 
	  Mixture models and missing data
	o Steffen Lauritzen and Bo Thiesson, Aalborg U. 
	  Learning Bayesian networks from incomplete data
	o Brian Ripley, Oxford U. 
	  Multiple imputation and simulation methods
	o Brian Ripley, Oxford U. 
	  Multiple imputation for neural nets and classification trees
	o Robert Tibshirani and Geoffrey Hinton, U. Toronto 
	  ``Coaching'' variables for regression and classification
	o Volker Tresp, Siemens AG 
	  Missing data: A fundamental problem in learning


FURTHER INFORMATION

The above is a snapshot of the workshop's web page:
           http://www.scs.unr.edu/~cbmr/nips/workshop-missing.html

A schedule of presentation times is not yet available as of today.

Sincerely, (the organizers:)

Harry Burke <burke at unr.edu>
David Rosen <rosen at unr.edu>
New York Medical College, Department of Medicine, Valhalla NY 10595 USA