Alexandria Engineering Journal (2022) 61, 937–947

H O S T E D BY
Alexandria University

Alexandria Engineering Journal

www.elsevier.com/locate/aej
www.sciencedirect.com

Missing data imputation of MAGDAS-9’s ground

electromagnetism with supervised machine learning
and conventional statistical analysis models
Muhammad Asraf H. a, Nur Dalila K.A. a,*, Nooritawati Md Tahir b,
Zatul Iffah Abd Latiff a,b, Mohamad Huzaimy Jusoh b, Yoshikawa Akimasa c

a
College of Engineering, Universiti Teknologi MARA Cawangan Johor, Kampus Pasir Gudang, Malaysia
b
College of Engineering, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Shah Alam, Selangor, Malaysia
c
International Center for Space Weather Science and Education, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan

Received 14 December 2020; revised 11 April 2021; accepted 27 April 2021

Available online 6 June 2021

KEYWORDS Abstract Data imputation studies include reconstruction or estimation of imperfect data gaps
Missing dataset; caused by system sensing failure, and non-responsive data transmission remains an open issue.
Imputation; In space weather applications, imputation of ground electromagnetism is significant in capturing
Geomagnetic storm; the complex interaction of sun–earth prior to the subsequent analysis of the space weather effects.
Space weather; Key contributions to the demonstration of supervised machine learning (ML) imputation approach
Supervised learning with artificial neural network, K-nearest neighbour, support vector regression (SVR), and General
Regression Neural Network (GRNN) for MAGDAS-9 ground electromagnetism dataset have not
yet been established. A total of 1,585,950 data points were analysed with supervised ML models
which included performance benchmark with statistical analysis namely zero value substitution, list-
wise deletion, mean substitution, and hot deck imputation. To achieve low reconstruction errors,
different imputation models with hyperparameter tuned settings are varied, and computational time
execution has been shown to contribute to imputation performance. Performance metrics measured
by mean square error (MSE), mean absolute error (MAE),mean absolute percentage error (MAPE),
and execution time respectively demonstrate the capability of SVR to perfectly impute missing data
for all ground electromagnetism components at an average of 0.314 MSE, 0.738 MAPE, closeness
to 0.510 MAE and 0.91-second at various percentage level of data missingness. A comparison with
traditional imputation shows that the supervised ML with SVR model has improved imputation
performance by up to 80% of data gap. The outcome of the proposed imputation will benefit space
weather applications for event characterisation, which will cover a large number of missing data in
the MAGDAS-9 dataset.
Ó 2021 THE AUTHORS. Published by Elsevier BV on behalf of Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria
University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: nurdalila306@uitm.edu.my (N.D. K.A.).
Peer review under responsibility of Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aej.2021.04.096
1110-0168 Ó 2021 THE AUTHORS. Published by Elsevier BV on behalf of Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
938
1. Introduction
Measurement of ground electromagnetism data of the earth in
the specific application of space weather faces challenges such
as missing data. Studies focused on space weather applications
have a profound effect on Earth because studying the interac-
tion with the solar system opens up possibilities for a new data
analytics field that can interpret the space effect [1] in terms of
identifying the root cause of the phenomenon and classifying
event occurrences in the space environment. To evaluate this
interaction, the system used for the observations of the electro-
magnetism of the earth from the space environment have been
actively installed; they include ground-based magnetometers
around the globe network called MAGnetic Data Acquisition
System (MAGDAS), International Real-time Magnetic Obser-
vatory Network (INTERMAGNET), and Indian Institute of
Geomagnetism (IIG) [2]. The magnetometer measures ground
electromagnetism data and performs data logging to record
the interaction activities which may be inconsistent due to lim-
itations of data logging applications. Among the major issues
in measuring variables include the disconnection of network
and hardware failure, system breakdown, sensing failure,
and/or connectivity issues when transferring the data to the
web server [3] which disable the main function of recording
daily measurement. Such a system failure can lead to a missing
gap in the data. Time-based variations on the order of seconds
cannot be logged and therefore, they produce gaps or data
imperfections; this is very typical for real-time datasets. Values
of recorded variables are often missing from complete datasets.
As an alternative option for data reconstruction from the miss-
ing gap, a data imputation technique can be selected as a viable
solution. Data imputation is necessary for ground electromag-
netism data to retain exclusive information on data gathering
that possesses continuous variation as time progresses.
These challenges need to be overcome because a complete
dataset is important for data pre-processing and cleaning,
and for the subsequent process of interpreting and analyzing
the event. Data imputation solves these issues by reconstruct-
ing missing data and gap presence. Various techniques have
been developed to handle missing data; the most common
approach is to disregard the missing data or impute the mean
substitution [4] of overall data towards an empty gap. This
approach is called the standard imputation approach or con-
ventional statistical analysis; however, the disadvantage of this
approach is that it includes bias, and this can subsequently
influence the prediction performance [5] in data analysis. Kline
[6] emphasizes the high error exhibited in the estimated missing
data caused by the case deletion effect with an incremental
error for the mean substitution case. Although no specific
algorithm is suitable for all applications, this imputation algo-
rithm preserves the joint distribution of data [7].
Existing literature in the space weather field does not thor-
oughly discuss this issue. A literature review indicated that sev-
eral traditional imputation approaches have been used as a
solution for a variety of applications; literature on energy
healthcare [8], wind turbines [9], climate [10], and crowd-
sourcing [11] applications revealed that the machine learning
(ML) method and conventional statistical analysis are the
two most popular techniques that are applied. The present
technique involves the traditional method [12,13], which
includes listwise deletion, mean substitution, and hotdeck. This
M.A. H. et al.
implementation by Turrado et al. [14] and Guo et al. [15] sug-
gests that deletion or substitution with a zero mean value is not
acceptable. Further, exclusion or deletion of data causes a
reduction in available data for further processing stages and
severely affects the bias interpretation and results in errors.
This indicator of the reduced data demonstrates that the miss-
ingness mechanism contributes significantly toward the predic-
tion performance of data imputation, and therefore, a
simulation is necessary to prove the impact of missing data.
For the traditional imputation approach, a high missingness
ratio of data imputation results in inaccurate prediction errors
caused by limited data input [16]. To overcome the abovemen-
tioned disadvantage, imputation by ML has been suggested by
Poulos [17] as an approach for improving prediction perfor-
mance while compensating for the bias in missing data.
Ramirez [18] highlighted that the imputation process requires
the fine-tuning of hyperparameters to produce the best model
in ML during imputation, and most surprisingly, an artificial
neural network (ANN) with a single hidden layer network
[19] outperformed other proposed methods with a minimum
of five hidden neurons trained with the Levenberg–Marquardt
learning rule. Gustavo et al. [20] and Jadhav [4] demonstrated
an opposition to ANN, in that K-NN imputation was proven
to be significant among the ML methods available. This is
because the K-NN has the capability to adjust the missing
value in the distance metric, and it alleviates the creation of
an explicit model. In another case study by Fusco [21], SVM
demonstrated excellent results in the reconstruction of missing
data compared to conventional statistical algorithms in arbo-
virus infectious disease prediction modelling; it achieved an
accuracy of 90% in the classification. The advantage of
SVM is that it is not influenced by the data distribution, and
it has strong output metrics for all distributions. Therefore,
the variability of the ML network to generalise the abovemen-
tioned missing data can vary depending on the data itself based
on distribution size and data type. The large size of the dataset
can also accommodate the data gap better than the statistical
approach.
Other points of view showed that the comparison of the
verdict in the climate application that includes time series data-
sets with fluctuating pattern characteristics necessitates a pre-
liminary assessment of the missingness mechanism [12,22]
rather than concentrating on the imputation model availabil-
ity. Imputation strategies depend on the nature and proportion
of missing data. Preliminary consideration is necessary to
ensure that successful prediction does not overlook the missing
data mechanism. This consideration requires thorough
research such as the examination of the missing analysis of
the data pattern to decide the correct imputation technique
[13] to improve accuracy. This study observes the nature of
missingness and provides the assessment of a suitable
approach for handling data imperfections. To understand the
data missingness mechanism, the most commonly available
models [23,24] are outlined as follows:

Missing completely at random (MCAR): The assumption
considered in this case is that missingness is unrelated to
its value or to the value of other variables.

Missing at random (MAR): The MAR case involves the
probability of missingness that depends on observed data.
The missing value depends on the data point value of other
Missing data imputation of MAGDAS-9’s ground electromagnetism
variables to the extent that the missingness is correlated
with other variables included in the analysis (i.e., the cause
of missingness is considered)

Missing not at random (MNAR). The assumption consid-
ered in MNAR case is that the probability of missingness
may depend on unobserved data. The missingness effect
depends on other variables of unobserved data, whereas
the data are not MCAR or MAR.
Nevertheless, the missingness mechanism has been unclear
and difficult to identify [17] in the datasets, and its effect may
be investigated to observe the performance of the data imputa-
tion approach. Furthermore, the dataset size and perturbation
percentage of data missingness needs further attention when
imputing the missing data [25]. For the MAR case, the assump-
tion holds that MAR cannot be generalised for missingness
caused by routine maintenance or calibration, and further
inquiry can be carried out randomly [7]. The MNAR missing
pattern caused by sensor failure, which leads to a continuous
missing sequence [26] demonstrated an improved prediction per-
formance in the missing data case. Further, data missingness
caused by several factors of MCAR [27] can be caused by data
management, human resources, and instrumentation error,
which demonstrated the effect of the missing data gap. Contra-
dictory findings with different mechanism types, trigger the close
analysis to include the study of data missingness level for further
investigation. Differences between data distribution and the rela-
tionship between data missingness are recommended for further
study to examine whether there is a pattern [28].
The wide range of work conducted earlier on of imputation
models shall serve as a guideline to probe further for the case
of the ground electromagnetism of solving missing data issues.
Even though various strategies are available to overcome the
missing gap in the datasets, a systematic approach to modify
the data should be devised considering data dimensionality and
incompleteness level. This includes preserving important data
characteristics during the data imputation process. Despite the
fact that ML techniques have been successfully applied for vari-
ous applications, data dimensionality and type of data may have
a significant influence on the developed model. Thus, there is no
standardized technique for specific applications [29]. The solu-
tion remains an open problem because none of the best
approaches generalised well for all ranges of the problem state-
ment; hence, the selection of an appropriate model with good
computational cost is preferred.
This study aims to compare various imputation techniques
between conventional and supervised ML approaches and eval-
uate how the selection of different imputation methods affects
reconstructed data. The proposed method, which estimates
incomplete data through a supervised ML approach, can adapt
new data based on existing patterns. To the best of the author’s
knowledge, this is the first study to investigate ground electro-
magnetism data imputation of missing data for space weather
applications in Malaysia. The study of data missingness involves
random data points missing in a given interval range. The out-
come of data imputation should provide reasonable data predic-
tion and preserve the important association between ground
electromagnetism data in the datasets.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: The
preliminary knowledge on theoretical methodology proposed
and the comparisons between methods of supervised ML are
presented in Section 2. The evaluation of the prediction perfor-
939
mance of the model and the discussions are presented in Sec-
tion 3, and finally, the conclusions with future works are
demonstrated in Section 4.
2. Methodology
The methodology of the data imputation described in Fig. 1
studies are performed with different models of supervised
ML, thereby including ANN, K-NN, SVR and GRNN against
standard imputation techniques; zero value substitution, list-
wise deletion, mean substitution, and hotdeck approach, which
were developed using the MATLAB platform. Imputation
using model-based MLs is developed as a prediction model
for estimating the required missing values in gap interval mea-
surements. Using supervised ML, these datasets were retrieved
from the cloud and divided into training, validation, and test-
ing datasets at a ratio of 70:15:15. The imputed dataset was
benchmarked with the original dataset in which the data gap
was set as the output attribute. Experiments to simulate the
percentage value of missing data were explored prior to evalu-
ation with a supervised learning model. In addition, perfor-
mance measurements were developed on the basis of mean
square error (MSE), mean absolute error (MAE), mean abso-
lute percentage error (MAPE), and computational time.
2.1. Access and availability of data
The datasets used contain sampled data of ground electromag-
netism located at the observatory station of the equatorial
region in Johor, Malaysia. Measurements using a magnetome-
ter device as the sensing elements acquire the daily variation of
the geomagnetic response, which represents the ground activi-
ties because of the reflections of the space weather activities
from the Sun–Earth interactions. Four datasets are available
online at http://magdas2.serc.kyushu-u.ac.jp/realtime/index.
html, which comprise the horizontal (H) component, declina-
tion (D) component, vertical downwards (Z) component, and
total magnetic field intensity (F) is depicted as in Fig. 2 consid-
ered as important parameters worthy of investigation. Such
data are stored in the data logging card as primary storage,
and concurrently display on the website to demonstrate the
current status of geomagnetic activities. Despite freely avail-
able data resources, data losses occurred because of the con-
nectivity issues and inconsistency of data supply, which
further disturbed the full operation of presenting the current
geomagnetic measurement. These datasets were collected
within one (1) month, spanning from June 1, 2017 to June
30, 2017 at 1-s intervals daily. There are approximately
52,865 original data points per day with a total of 1,585,950
data points, which is captured from.8:11:54 am to
10:52:58 pm. The evaluation for validating the purpose with
new data sets of 52,895 retrieved on July 17, 2017 was con-
ducted to observe the model performance.
2.2. Brief overview of ML versus conventional imputation
approach
2.2.1. Artificial neural network (ANN)
In previous studies, ANNs demonstrated successful applica-
tions resembling human brain function to perform tasks such
as prediction, estimation, and classification. The network struc-
940
Fig. 1 Methodology framework for overall data imputation process.
Fig. 2 Sample datasets of ground electromagnetism separated into three sections of data are acquired from the website.
ture is composed of three layers: input, output, and hidden layer,
each possessing nodes or neurons for each layer with intercon-
nected weights among the nodes. The input layer contains
ground electromagnetism data that are transferred to the hidden
layer and finally directed to the output layer. The interconnected
nodes are randomly assigned with the weight and bias towards
each neuron, whereas these nodes are continuously updated by
the backpropagation step algorithm known as multilayer percep-
tron. Datasets were partitioned into a ratio of 70% training,
15% testing, and 15% validation. Subsequent to the developed
model, the ground electromagnetism data were examined with
new testing data retrieved on July 17, 2017. Meanwhile, the num-
ber of hidden neurons varied between and 3–12 neurons in the
hidden layer. A linear transfer function was selected as the trans-
fer function to obtain the output.
2.2.2. K-Nearest Neighbour (K-NN)
Among the mentioned supervised ML model, K-NN has
widely selected and implemented in data imputation applica-
tions because of its capability of preserving the value of the
M.A. H. et al.
missing data with the value of related cases (K-similarity of
features) from the entire dataset. Missing data is calculated
by defining a variable of K-nearest neighbor, and then, averag-
ing the non-missing values to its neighbors. The K value is
selected heuristically based on the Euclidean distance,
Dða; bÞ(referring to Eq. (1)) by calculating the square root of
the sum of the difference between the estimated new value
_
(y ) and the original value (yt ). Depending on the dataset size
t
and percentage of missing values, the imputation process
requires good tuning to avoid susceptibility to overfitting
and sensitive data points [20]
sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
Xn  2
_
Dða; bÞ ¼ y yt ð1Þ
t
t¼1
2.2.3. Support vector regression (SVR)
Another supervised ML model that currently has received con-
siderable attention includes SVR (or known as support vector
machine (SVM)) [30] that imputes the missing data by con-
Missing data imputation of MAGDAS-9’s ground electromagnetism
structing the nth hyperplane to separate the data. The objective
function is introduced in Eq. (2) to minimise the loss function
while maximizing the distance to the nearest data points. Thus,
linear or nonlinear separable data were handled by applying
linear or SVR’s kernel tricks, which comprise polynomial
and Gaussian types, as demonstrated in Eq. (3) where m is
the number of data points, x is the weight coefficient, C is
the tuning parameter constant, n is the slack variable, b is
the constant coefficient, xi ¼ xj is the input data, K is the ker-
nel function, and U is the transformation function. The
imputed missing value or predicted input values can be repre-
sented as the prediction fðxÞ function shown in Eq. (4).
Xm
1
min k x k2 þ C ðni þ ni Þ ð2Þ
2 i¼1
Kðxi ; xj Þ ¼ UT ðxi ÞUðxj Þ ð3Þ
fðxÞ ¼ hx; UðxÞi þ b ð4Þ
2.2.4. General regression neural network (GRNN)
The GRNN implements a non-linear regression with a one-
pass learning algorithm that can be used to impute missing
data. Similar to ANN architecture, which consists of an input
layer, a radial layer with a Gaussian feature, and an output
layer, but needs less training data than neural networks. One
of the interesting features to investigate is GRNN’s ability to
generate consistent prediction results [31] and to achieve an
accurate prediction result in a short period of time [32]. Based
on a probability density function, this model employs a func-
tional relationship between dependent and target data. The
efficiency of missing data imputation can thus be calculated
by varying the smoothing factor, r. The GRNN model’s
imputed missing data sequence follows Eqs. (5)–(7), which
begins with the search for Euclidean distances, Di of the input
vector, then moves to Gaussian distances, Gi and finally eval-
uates the target data, Y.
vffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
uX
u n  2
Di ¼ t yij  yj ð5Þ
j¼1
ðDi Þ2
Gi ¼ eð r2
Þ
ð6Þ
Pm
i¼1 ðDi xYi Þ
Y¼ Pm ð7Þ
i¼1 Di
2.2.5. Conventional imputation model for predicting missing data
gap
Most executed approach to handle the missing data either by
data eliminating or substituting with the mean value of the
overall data. Although these issues were prolonged, this tech-
nique has become preferred when dealing with missing values
in the dataset considered for the analysis. Therefore, statistic
means was commonly adopted using list-wise deletion; it is
also known as complete case analysis that disregards an empty
dataset. The advantages of this technique include comparabil-
ity across the analyses and the fact that it does not introduce
bias to the estimated parameter estimates; however, substantial
loss of critical information when large samples are excluded
941
[33]. Another technique of imputing the missing data with a
mean substitution or zero value substitution approach toward
the missing instances. For the case of mean and zero value sub-
stitution, the missing data in a variable are replaced with the
mean and zero of its variable; however, the zero value is
unsuitable for a large number of missing data points, which
leads to changes in data distribution [4]. For the case of hot
deck imputation, the substitution of the data gap is replaced
by ‘‘similar” non-missing values of neighbors, which resembles
the K-NN approach, which is set as k = 1. This approach does
not rely on model fitting, for the missing value that is to be
imputed and thus potentially less susceptible to missing data
[34].
2.3. Performance model evaluation
Such parameters of MSE, MAE, and MAPE can be used to
investigate the estimation accuracy and how the missing rate
affects the performance [35] of the estimated missing data,
thereby resulting in supervised ML generalisation capability.
The MSE at Eq. (8) demonstrates the error distribution mea-
sured in terms of the square deviation mean. The MAE evalu-
ates the closeness of the absolute value between the imputed
and actual data points, where the value approaching zero is
the most ideal case. The lowest indicator between different
models is used to compare MAE with the lowest value, thereby
showing the best overall results. Eq. (9) is highly desirable to
achieve at low MAE because of the resemblance of imputed
data as close as possible to the actual data point. Meanwhile
in Eq. (9), it is highly desirable. To obtain a low MAE because
of the consistency of the imputed data as close as possible to
the actual data point. MAPE in per Eq. (10) evaluates the mea-
sure of prediction accuracy of the imputation method, and it
can be used to identify the loss function for the supervised
_
ML model. The following notations of where are y the
t
imputed value, yt : actual value, and n: number of missing value
data points are conducted throughout the analysis.
 2
Pn
t¼1
_
y yt
t
MSE ¼ ð8Þ
n
_ 

n  y yt 

1 X t 
MAPE ¼ :   ð9Þ
n t¼1  yt 
 
 
Pn  _

y
t¼1  t  y 
t
MAE ¼ ð10Þ
n
3. Results and discussion
The estimation technique to accommodate missing data
depends on the pattern and the extent of data severity missing
(from little to moderate to large amounts of data affected).
Experiments on several benchmarks of ground electromag-
netism datasets simulated at 30% of missing values artificially
articulate the effect of missing patterns in the training and test-
ing datasets. The imputation was selected for the most occur-
rence of missingness, which is commonly experienced during
942
Table 1 Information on hyperparameter tuning used in the
imputation prediction.
ML-model Hyperparameter Tuning values
algorithm
ANN Train function {trainlm, trainbr, trainscg}
Hidden neuron {3, 6, 9, 12}
KNN K {5,10,50,100,150, 200,300,500}
d {euclidean,
minkowski,correlation}
SVR e {0.01, 0.1, 1}
C {0.01, 0.1, 1,10,100}
c {0.001, 0.01, 0.1, 1}
kernel {gaussian, polynomial, linear}
GRNN r {0.5,0.7,1,1.5,2,2.5,3,3.5,6,7,10}
disconnection data communication at night. The assessment of
the best architecture to produce the most optimized imputa-
tion of data is conducted by trial-and-error by adjusting the
parameters of the supervised ML model with its tuning values
as summarized in Table 1.
The best imputation output can be achieved by manipulat-
ing the associated parameters related to the supervised ML or
the feed-forward architecture in ANN. A simpler structure was
favored with a reduced number of hidden units, and a
decreased computational processing time had the added
advantage of being selected as an appropriate imputation
model. Simulations to train several feed-forward neural net-
works using one hidden layer with different numbers of hidden
neurons (from 3 to 12) and different activation functions for
the hidden layers with the scaled conjugate gradient backprop-
agation network (trainscg), Lavernberg–Marquardt (trainlm),
and Bayesian regularisation backpropagation (trainbr) were
Fig. 3 Comparison between predicted and actual missing data of (a) H components, (b) D components, (c) Z components and (d) F
components for ground electromagnetism data.
M.A. H. et al.
used for the training function. The neural network has one hid-
den node with a linear activation function for the output layer.
To avoid overfitting, the training stops if the number of itera-
tions reaches 1000 epochs or if the magnitude of the gradient is
less than 1  107. Meanwhile, for K-NN, tuning parameters
to impute the missing values vary from 5 to 500 nearest neigh-
bours. As KNN evaluates missing values based on its neigh-
bour, it may be prone to over-fitting and noise-sensitivity
when K is too small or covers a large value of data points away
from the neighbour, and while the impute data may appear to
be bias-prone when it covers more instance space. Because this
imputation technique involves scanning the entire dataset to
find the K-NN, it can be costly and suffer from poor perfor-
mance, particularly for a large dataset. With SVR, the tuning
process involves e parameter, C parameter, gamma values c;
different kernel tricks were implemented to demonstrate the
influence on performance when imputing the gap of missing
data. Iterations between parameters were varied from 0.001
to 1 to obtain the best performance with the lowest perfor-
mance indicators. Among all model structures, GRNN is the
simplest, requiring tuning from a single parameter known as
the smoothing factor,r. This parameter was varied from 0.5
to 10 in order to achieve the best imputation technique. The
simulated output was compared with that of actual datasets,
and the predicted missing data are illustrated in Fig. 3.
The performance of the conventional and supervised ML
models was quantitatively assessed and benchmarked against
the complete datasets using MSE, MAE, and MAPE in Table 2
and Fig. 4. Among conventional approaches such as zero value
substitution, mean imputation, and hotdeck imputation, the
hotdeck represents the best predicted data imputation
throughout all components as it follows pattern variation to
match the actual datasets. Although the output representation
Missing data imputation of MAGDAS-9’s ground electromagnetism 943

Table 2 From top left; Performance of the statistical model for missing data imputation (a) Mean square error; (b) Mean absolute
error; and (c) Mean absolute percentage error for H,D,Z, and F components.
Conventional missing data imputation
Ground Percentage Zero value Listwise Mean Substitution Hotdeck
Electromagnetism of Data deletion
data Missing (%)
MSE MAE MAPE MSE/ MSE MAE MAPE MSE MAE MAPE
MAE/
MAPE
H 10 1.66E+09 4.08E+04 0.9998 – 18.3711 3.0295 0.0001 2.64 1.22 0.00
D 5.3695 2.0288 0.9998 – 62.0735 7.5411 0.9474 44.43 6.32 1.19
Z 9.51E+07 9.75E+03 0.9998 – 3.5762 1.8235 0.0002 367.66 19.11 0.00
F 1.76E+09 4.19E+04 0.9998 – 19.6161 3.347 0.0001 30.57 5.42 0.00
H 30 1.66E+09 4.08E+04 0.9999 – 83.5280 8.2768 0.0002 4.73 1.85 0.00
D 19.9695 3.8384 0.9999 – 40.1827 5.5776 0.6282 36.01 5.69 0.76
Z 9.51E+07 9.75E+03 0.9999 – 3.2679 1.7373 0.0002 332.92 18.21 0.00
F 1.76E+09 4.19E+04 0.9999 – 85.1576 8.4539 0.0002 36.80 5.97 0.00
H 50 1.66E+09 4.08E+04 1.0000 – 112.6472 10.0769 0.0002 5.09 1.98 0.00
D 49.6126 6.1177 1.0000 – 23.9827 3.8353 0.4451 23.31 4.12 0.52
Z 9.51E+07 9.75E+03 1.0000 – 3.0541 1.5953 0.0002 304.17 17.38 0.00
F 1.76E+09 4.19E+04 1.0000 – 113.6432 10.1571 0.0002 36.12 5.92 0.00
H 60 1.66E+09 4.08E+04 1.0000 – 138.6666 11.2841 0.0003 4.55 1.82 0.00
D 64.1393 7.0431 1.0000 – 19.4077 3.5461 0.4516 19.66 3.58 0.45
Z 9.51E+07 9.75E+03 1.0000 – 2.2585 1.3795 0.0001 285.89 16.80 0.00
F 1.76E+09 4.19E+04 1.0000 – 135.6664 11.1509 0.0003 33.09 5.62 0.00
H 70 1.66E+09 4.08E+04 1.0000 – 143.9195 11.2039 0.0003 6.44 2.08 0.00
D 73.0635 7.6413 1.0000 – 18.6062 3.8095 0.5663 16.92 3.15 0.39
Z 9.51E+07 9.75E+03 1.0000 – 2.9693 1.3604 0.0001 269.26 16.26 0.00
F 1.76E+09 4.19E+04 1.0000 – 135.6148 10.7864 0.0003 29.08 5.09 0.00
H 80 1.66E+09 4.08E+04 1.0000 – 112.4498 9.4319 0.0002 15.98 2.95 0.00
D 80.1732 8.1072 1.0000 – 29.9158 4.8573 1.1023 14.97 2.88 0.35
Z 9.51E+07 9.75E+03 1.0000 – 9.1377 2.4629 0.0003 257.33 15.88 0.00
F 1.76E+09 4.19E+04 1.0000 – 100.4164 8.9093 0.0002 29.66 5.16 0.00

Fig. 4 from top left; Performance of the supervised machine learning model (a) Mean square error; (b) Mean absolute error; and (c)
Mean absolute percentage error for H,D,Z, and F components.
944
resulted in gap differences of pattern on average 7.93 MAE,
102.62 MSE, and 0.19 MAPE, all components slightly fol-
lowed the actual output with distorted component magnitudes;
however, the Z components were depicted to produce very
large discrepancies of 18.21 MAE and 332.92 MSE. The
remaining two conventional approaches, zero value substitu-
tion and mean imputation did not resemble identical predicted
outputs. The predicted output of missing data imputation with
ANN best tuned parameters for 30% missing data; with hid-
den neurons of 9 neurons at the Levenberg–Marquardt func-
tion perfectly follows the actual H, D, and F components,
except for Z components, thereby resulting in inaccurate pre-
dicted output with 11.028 MSE; however, the lowest MAPE
of 0.35 for the D component was observed compared to the
other components.
Nevertheless, the pattern showed that the capability of
ANN to simulate the output of H, D, and F components at
a promising error of less than 1; however, it failed to impute
the gap for the Z component. The case is similar to GRNN
that capable to follow the pattern of H, D, and F components,
however produced the error of greater than 1. The SVR pro-
duced the best simulated components for H, D, Z, and F com-
ponents and it was capable of accurately imputing the missing
data perfectly at an average of 0.314 MSE, 0.738 MAPE, and
closeness to 0.510 MAE, on average for all components. The
K-NN approach produced the worst imputation outcome for
all except for the H components that can track the actual data.
Regardless of the number of K, imperfect missing data impu-
tation was presented for the entire distance used, namely,
Euclidean, Minkowski, and correlation. A greater number of
neighbours significantly affected the error distribution between
the predicted and actual imputation missing data for H-
components, which reach approximately 53.03 MSE at
k = 500 neighbours when implementing the correlation type
of distance. The remaining components did not experience
major variations of MSE and MAE when the number of k
was increased further; however, the computational time execu-
tion increased further. In terms of computational time, Table 2
indicates that the tuning of the e, C, and c parameters influ-
ences the execution of the predicted gap for missing data. Dif-
ferently tuned c parameters demonstrate that the lowest
c = 0.001 executed to the predicted output with the least time
required for the Gaussian kernel function, followed by C-
parameter adjustment at the highest setting, C = 100 to result
in the least computational testing time execution. Thus, the
overall Gaussian function appeared to take 0.02 s; however,
a trade-off still exists so as to cause the highest MSE to be
highest at 136.09 for the Z-component. For the linear kernel
function, increments in both C and c parameters could reduce
the computational time execution with the addition of the low
MSE. Perfect tuning for e at the lowest while compromising to
the lowest error and predicted output for all components was
achieved with low e = 0.01. Therefore, the best tuned SVR
kernel fits a linear function with e = 0.01, C = 0.1, and
c = 1. Nevertheless, the polynomial and Gaussian functions
resulted in a similar execution of computational time; however,
the quantitative assessment via MSE and MAE demonstrated
the deviated and fluctuating error of either one or all H,D,Z,
and F components into undesirable high values. In view of
scrutinizing the missing data percentage to the quantitative
M.A. H. et al.
performance measures by simulating the missing data for the
case of exceeding and lessening from the 30% rate are depicted
in Fig. 4.
The increase in missing data up to 80% affected the pre-
dicted imputation throughout the overall magnetic data com-
ponents, either increased or decreased in performance,
thereby depending on the imputation model. Mean substitu-
tion demonstrated a decreased pattern for the MSE when the
missing rate was increased from 10% to 70%, which imposed
the D and Z components data. Subsequently, MSE increased
when the missing data reached 80%. Overall, the hotdeck
and supervised ML showed a decreased pattern in MSE per-
formance of D, Z, and F components from 30% to 80% rate
of missing data. Except for SVR, the inconsistency of perfor-
mance either increased or decreased when the missing rate con-
tinued to increase further. In terms of the MAE performance,
the H, D, Z, and F components for all imputation models fit
inconsistently when the rate of missing data increased, thereby
causing the MAE performance to either decrease or increase.
The MAPE performance for the overall imputation model
reached approximately zero, except for H-components, which
slightly increased; however, the performance remained accept-
able. As a result, the contrast between the ML model and tra-
ditional methods revealed the existence of missing values in a
dataset capable of being replicated, which eventually had an
effect on performance assessments. In our case, which include
a large number of data point sizes, the variables found are used
to affect this error evaluation, and they include parameter tun-
ing and percentages of missing values. Furthermore, quantifi-
cation of execution time demonstrated by testing data, as
shown in Fig. 5, has revealed that linear-based SVR model
computes more time during training phase to fill the missing
data, nevertheless it can execute in less than a second during
testing phase.
Our findings show that there is a relationship between the
distribution of the data pattern and the output of the imputa-
tion model. Consequently, common dataset patterns benefit
the most from different imputation techniques if different
missing rates and related parameters are considered. The
results show that SVR is the optimal approach for any data
percentage rate that is lacking. In addition, SVR does not seem
to be influenced by the distribution of data trends with good
performance measures for all distributions. However, further
analysis is required to investigate and understand the general-
isation between missing data performance and its missingness
mechanism. Among the three schemes mentioned above,
ground electromagnetism data of the H, D, and Z components
tends to encompass MCAR missingness because of the sensing
mechanism and system failure [36]. Meanwhile, the total mag-
netic field intensity (F) includes the MAR type of missingness
mechanism. The finding revealed that no pattern could gener-
alise the missingness correlation with either MCAR or
MNAR. Visual assessment of all components of the datasets
revealed that both H and D components that predicted well
could lead to pattern matching when the F-component was
imputed. This occurred perfectly for the ANN and slightly
accurate for the hotdeck and k-NN imputation models. Even
though a certain model affected the F-component, the trends
to match the actual dataset revealed that both H and D com-
ponents correlate with the F-component.
Missing data imputation of MAGDAS-9’s ground electromagnetism 945

Fig. 5 Performance of training time and testing time between models (a) Gaussian kernel; (b) polynomial kernel; and, (c) linear kernel.

4. Conclusion and future work
In conclusion, we show the presentation of the supervised ML
mechanism in data imputation for ground electromagnetism in
space weather applications. Utilization of various strategies to
reconstruct the presence of data gaps and determine the com-
plete data enables further space weather event processing and
subsequent analysis. The dataset pattern was observed to vary
in terms of predicted tracking capability and performance met-
rics evaluation via the techniques of MSE, MAE, MAPE, and
946
computational time when different imputation models and
hyperparameters settings were used. Considering different pat-
terns and a large dataset of data distribution requires a differ-
ent exploitation of the imputation model; overall, for
MAGDAS-9 ground electromagnetism data, the data gap
could be imputed well with the linear-based SVR technique
at the optimal hyperparameter setting of e = 0.01, C = 0.1,
and c = 1; meanwhile, low values of MSE, MAE, MAPE,
and computational time at 0.00089, 0.01697, and 0.738, respec-
tively were considered on an average for all H, D, Z, and F
components of the magnetic data, and for up to 80% missing-
ness percentage. The sutablility of the selected data imputation
can be concluded depends on data pattern, missignness mech-
anism, data type and the missingness percentage have influ-
enced to the performance evaluation. Further visual
assessment confirmed the findings to justify the model ability
to follow the data pattern. Therefore, considering the success-
ful approach and achievements, future work will focus on
developing an ensemble prediction method such as ensemble
SVR [37], GRNN-SGTM [38] by optimising hyperparameters
to obtain high-performance results while reducing computa-
tional time. This allows for further optimised outcomes to
improve imputation model performances.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing
financial interests or personal relationships that could have
appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
The acknowledgement is dedicated to support grants obtained
from the Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE), Malaysia,
and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universiti
Teknologi MARA under the Fundamental Research Grant
Scheme, FRGS (Grant No. 600-IRMI / FRGS 5/3
(091/2019)). The work was also supported by JSPS KAKENHI
Grant Number JP20H01961. The authors also acknowledge the
collaboration with the Malaysian Space Agency (MYSA) and
the International Center for Space Weather, Japan.
References
[1] E. Camporeale, The challenge of machine learning in space
weather: nowcasting and forecasting, Sp. Weather. 17 (8) (2019)
1166–1207, https://doi.org/10.1029/2018SW002061.
[2] W.N.I. Ismail, N.S.A. Hamid, M. Abdullah, N.H.M. Shukur, A.
Yoshikawa, Variation of equatorial electrojet current profiles
over Solar Phases, ASM Sci. J. 12 (Special Issue 2) (2019) 125–133
https://kyushu-u.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/variation-
of-equatorial-electrojet-current-profiles-over-solar-ph.
[3] R. Tkachenko, O. Mishchuk, I. Izonin, N. Kryvinska, R.
Stoliarchuk, A non-iterative neural-like framework for missing
data imputation, Procedia Comput. Sci. 155 (2019) 319–326,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2019.08.046.
[4] A. Jadhav, D. Pramod, K. Ramanathan, Comparison of
performance of data imputation methods for numeric dataset,
Appl. Artif. Intell. 33 (10) (2019) 913–933, https://doi.org/
10.1080/08839514.2019.1637138.
[5] S. Kang, E. Kim, J. Shim, W. Chang, S. Cho, Product failure
prediction with missing data, Int. J. Prod. Res. 56 (14) (2018)
4849–4859, https://doi.org/10.1080/00207543.2017.1407883.
M.A. H. et al.
[6] D. Kline, R. Andridge, E. Kaizar, Comparing multiple
imputation methods for systematically missing subject-level
data, Res. Synth. Methods. 8 (2) (2017) 136–148.
[7] E. Afrifa-Yamoah, U.A. Mueller, S.M. Taylor, A.J. Fisher,
Missing data imputation of high-resolution temporal climate
time series data, Meteorol. Appl. 27 (1) (2020), https://doi.org/
10.1002/met.v27.110.1002/met.1873.
[8] R. Ramezani, M. Maadi, S.M. Khatami, A novel hybrid
intelligent system with missing value imputation for diabetes
diagnosis, Alexandria Eng. J. 57 (3) (2018) 1883–1891, https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.aej.2017.03.043.
[9] M. Martinez-Luengo, M. Shafiee, A. Kolios, Data management
for structural integrity assessment of offshore wind turbine
support structures: Data cleansing and missing data imputation,
Ocean Eng. 173 (2019) 867–883, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
oceaneng.2019.01.003.
[10] D.A. Williams, B. Nelsen, C. Berrett, G.P. Williams, T.K.
Moon, A comparison of data imputation methods using
Bayesian compressive sensing and Empirical Mode
Decomposition for environmental temperature data, Environ.
Model. Softw. 102 (2018) 172–184, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
envsoft.2018.01.012.
[11] C. Ye, H. Wang, W. Lu, J. Li, Effective Bayesian-network-based
missing value imputation enhanced by crowdsourcing,
Knowledge-Based Syst. 190 (2020) 105199, https://doi.org/
10.1016/j.knosys.2019.105199.
[12] M.S. Osman, A.M. Abu-Mahfouz, P.R. Page, A survey on data
imputation techniques: water distribution system as a use case,
IEEE Access 6 (2018) 63279–63291, https://doi.org/10.1109/
Access.628763910.1109/ACCESS.2018.2877269.
[13] R.J.A. Little, D.B. Rubin, Statistical Analysis with Missing
Data, John Wiley & Sons, 2019.
[14] C. Crespo Turrado, F. Sánchez Lasheras, J.L. Calvo-Rollé, A.J.
Piñón-Pazos, M.G. Melero, F.J. de Cos Juez, Hybrid algorithm
for missing data imputation and its application to electrical data
loggers, Sensors (Switzerland) 16 (9) (2016) 1467, https://doi.
org/10.3390/s16091467.
[15] Z. Guo, Y. Wan, H. Ye, A data imputation method for
multivariate time series based on generative adversarial network,
Neurocomputing. 360 (2019) 185–197, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
neucom.2019.06.007.
[16] Y. Zhuang, R. Ke, Y. Wang, Innovative method for traffic data
imputation based on convolutional neural network, IET Intell.
Transp. Syst. 13 (4) (2019) 605–613, https://doi.org/10.1049/iet-
its.2018.5114.
[17] J. Poulos, R. Valle, Missing data imputation for supervised
learning, Appl. Artif. Intell. 32 (2) (2018) 186–196, https://doi.
org/10.1080/08839514.2018.1448143.
[18] E.L. Silva-Ramı́rez, R. Pino-Mejı́as, M. López-Coello, Single
imputation with multilayer perceptron and multiple imputation
combining multilayer perceptron and k-nearest neighbours for
monotone patterns, Appl. Soft Comput. J. 29 (2015) 65–74,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asoc.2014.09.052.
[19] Y. Elfahham, Estimation and prediction of construction cost
index using neural networks, time series, and regression,
Alexandria Eng. J. 58 (2) (2019) 499–506, https://doi.org/
10.1016/j.aej.2019.05.002.
[20] G.E.A.P.A. Batista, M.C. Monard, An analysis of four missing
data treatment methods for supervised learning, Appl. Artif.
Intell. 17 (5-6) (2003) 519–533, https://doi.org/10.1080/
713827181.
[21] T. Fusco, Y. Bi, H. Wang, F. Browne, Data mining and machine
learning approaches for prediction modelling of schistosomiasis
disease vectors, Int. J. Mach. Learn. Cybern. 11 (6) (2020) 1159–
1178, https://doi.org/10.1007/s13042-019-01029-x.
[22] M. Suresh, R. Taib, Y. Zhao, W. Jin, Sharpening the BLADE:
Missing data imputation using supervised machine learning, in:
Missing data imputation of MAGDAS-9’s ground electromagnetism
Australas. Jt. Conf. Artif. Intell, 11919, Springer, pp. 215–227.
[23] E.L. Silva-Ramı́rez, M. López-Coello, R. Pino-Mejı́as, An
application sample of machine learning tools, such as SVM
and ANN, for data editing and imputation, Stud. in Fuzziness
and Soft Comput. (2018) 259–298, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-
3-319-62359-7_13.
[24] M. Kokla, J. Virtanen, M. Kolehmainen, J. Paananen, K.
Hanhineva, Random forest-based imputation outperforms other
methods for imputing LC-MS metabolomics data: A
comparative study, BMC Bioinformatics 20 (1) (2019) 1–11,
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12859-019-3110-0.
[25] S.J. Choudhury, N.R. Pal, Imputation of missing data with
neural networks for classification, Knowledge-Based Syst. 182
(2019) 104838, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2019.07.009.
[26] J. Ke, S. Zhang, H. Yang, X. Chen, PCA-based missing
information imputation for real-time crash likelihood
prediction under imbalanced data, Transp. A Transp. Sci. 15
(2) (2019) 872–895, https://doi.org/10.1080/
23249935.2018.1542414.
[27] W.Y. Lai, K.K. Kuok, A study on bayesian principal
component analysis for addressing missing rainfall data, Water
Resour. Manag. 33 (8) (2019) 2615–2628, https://doi.org/
10.1007/s11269-019-02209-8.
[28] R. Ratolojanahary, R. Houé Ngouna, K. Medjaher, J. Junca-
Bourié, F. Dauriac, M. Sebilo, Model selection to improve
multiple imputation for handling high rate missingness in a
water quality dataset, Expert Syst. Appl. 131 (2019) 299–307,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2019.04.049.
[29] W. Van Echelpoel, P.L.M. Goethals, Variable importance for
sustaining macrophyte presence via random forests: data
imputation and model settings, Sci. Rep. 8 (2018) 14557,
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-32966-2.
[30] S. Li, H. Fang, X. Liu, Parameter optimization of support
vector regression based on sine cosine algorithm, Expert Syst.
947
Appl. 91 (2018) 63–77, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
eswa.2017.08.038.
[31] O.A. Alomair, A.A. Garrouch, A general regression neural
network model offers reliable prediction of CO2 minimum
miscibility pressure, J. Pet. Explor. Prod. Technol. 6 (3) (2016)
351–365, https://doi.org/10.1007/s13202-015-0196-4.
[32] I. Izonin, N. Kryvinska, P. Vitynskyi, R. Tkachenko, and K.
Zub, GRNN approach towards missing data recovery between
IoT systems, in: International Conference on Intelligent
Networking and Collaborative Systems, 2019, p. 445–453.
[33] R. Deb, A.W.C. Liew, Missing value imputation for the analysis
of incomplete traffic accident data, Inf. Sci. (Ny) 339 (2016) 274–
289, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ins.2016.01.018.
[34] L.A. Hunt, Missing data imputation and its effect on the
accuracy of classification, in: Data Sci., Springer, 2017, pp. 3–14.
[35] X. Yan, A. Mohammadian, Forecasting daily reference
evapotranspiration for Canada using the Penman-Monteith
model and statistically downscaled global climate model
projections, Alexandria Eng. J. 59 (2) (2020) 883–891, https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.aej.2020.03.020.
[36] S. Sankaranarayanan, G. Swaminathan, T.K. Radhakrishnan,
N. Sivakumaran, Missing data estimation and IoT-based flyby
monitoring of a water distribution system: Conceptual and
experimental validation, Int. J. Commun. Syst. 22 (2019),
https://doi.org/10.1002/dac.4135 e4135.
[37] Q. Shang, Z. Yang, S. Gao, D. Tan, An imputation method for
missing traffic data based on FCM optimized by PSO-SVR, J.
Adv. Transp. 2018 (2018) 1–21, https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/
2935248.
[38] I. Izonin, R. Tkachenko, V. Verhun, K. Zub, An approach
towards missing data management using improved GRNN-
SGTM ensemble method, Eng. Sci. Technol. an Int. J. 24 (3)
(2021) 749–759, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jestch.2020.10.005.