10.52 Missing Targets

20180726 Sometimes there may be further operations to perform on the dataset prior to modelling. A common task is to deal with missing values. Here we remove observations with a missing target. As with any missing data we should also analyse whether there is any pattern to the missing targets. This may be indicative of a systemic data issue rather than simply randomly missing values.

# Check the dimensions to start with.

dim(ds)
## [1] 226868     24
# Identify observations with a missing target.

ds %>%
  pull(target) %>%
  is.na() ->
missing.target

# Check how many are found.

sum(missing.target)
## [1] 6774
# Remove observations with a missing target.

ds %<>% filter(!missing.target)

# Confirm the filter delivered the expected dataset.

dim(ds)
## [1] 220094     24


Your donation will support ongoing availability and give you access to the PDF version of this book. Desktop Survival Guides include Data Science, GNU/Linux, and MLHub. Books available on Amazon include Data Mining with Rattle and Essentials of Data Science. Popular open source software includes rattle, wajig, and mlhub. Hosted by Togaware, a pioneer of free and open source software since 1984. Copyright © 1995-2022 Graham.Williams@togaware.com Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0