Sains Malaysiana, 2015;44:449-456.

Abstract

This paper presents various imputation methods for air quality data specifically in Malaysia. The main objective was to
select the best method of imputation and to compare whether there was any difference in the methods used between stations
in Peninsular Malaysia. Missing data for various cases are randomly simulated with 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 and 30% missing.
Six methods used in this paper were mean and median substitution, expectation-maximization (EM) method, singular
value decomposition (SVD), K-nearest neighbour (KNN) method and sequential K-nearest neighbour (SKNN) method. The
performance of the imputations is compared using the performance indicator: The correlation coefficient (R), the index
of agreement (d) and the mean absolute error (MAE). Based on the result obtained, it can be concluded that EM, KNN
and SKNN are the three best methods. The same result are obtained for all the eight monitoring station used in this study.