Missing values and data enrichment: an application to social media liking

Abstract

In the big data context, it is very frequent to manage the analysis of missing values. This is especially relevant in the field of statistical analysis, where this represents a thorny issue. This study proposes a strategy for data enrichment in presence of sparse matrices. The research objective consists in the evaluation of a possible distinction of behaviour among observations in sparse matrices with missing data. After selecting among the multiple imputation methods, an innovative technique will be presented to impute missing observations as a negative position or a neutral opinion. This method has been applied to a dataset measuring the interaction between users and social network pages for some Italian newspapers.