Missing values are a serious problem in surveys. The literature suggests to replace these with realistic values using imputation methods. This master thesis examines four different imputation techniques concerning their ability for handling missing data. Therefore, mean imputation, conditional mean imputation, Expectation-Maximization algorithm and Markov-Chain-Monte-Carlo method are presented. In addition, the three first mentioned methods were simulated by using a large real data set. To analyse the quality of these techniques a metric variable of the original data set was chosen to generate some missing values considering different percentages of missingness and common missing data mechanism. After the replacement of the simulated missing values, several statistical parameters, like quantiles, arithmetic mean and variance of all completed data sets were calculated in order to compare them with the parameters from the original data set. The results, that have been established by empiric data analysis, show that the Expectation-Maximization algorithm estimates all considered statistical parameters of the complete data set far better than the other analysed imputation methods, although the assumption of a multivariate normal distribution could not be achieved. It is found, that the mean as well as the conditional mean imputation produce statistically significant estimator for the arithmetic mean under the supposition of missing completely at random, whereas other parameters as the variance do not show the estimated effects. Generally, the accuracy of all estimators from the three imputation methods decreases with increasing percentage of missingness. The results lead to the conclusion that the Expectation-Maximization algorithm should be preferred over the mean and the conditional mean imputation.

Missing values are a serious problem in surveys. The literature suggests to replace these with realistic values using imputation methods. This master thesis examines four different imputation techniques concerning their ability for handling missing data. Therefore, mean imputation, conditional mean imputation, Expectation-Maximization algorithm and Markov-Chain-Monte-Carlo method are presented. In addition, the three first mentioned methods were simulated by using a large real data set. To analyse the quality of these techniques a metric variable of the original data set was chosen to generate some missing values considering different percentages of missingness and common missing data mechanism. After the replacement of the simulated missing values, several statistical parameters, like quantiles, arithmetic mean and variance of all completed data sets were calculated in order to compare them with the parameters from the original data set. The results, that have been established by empiric data analysis, show that the Expectation-Maximization algorithm estimates all considered statistical parameters of the complete data set far better than the other analysed imputation methods, although the assumption of a multivariate normal distribution could not be achieved. It is found, that the mean as well as the conditional mean imputation produce statistically significant estimator for the arithmetic mean under the supposition of missing completely at random, whereas other parameters as the variance do not show the estimated effects. Generally, the accuracy of all estimators from the three imputation methods decreases with increasing percentage of missingness. The results lead to the conclusion that the Expectation-Maximization algorithm should be preferred over the mean and the conditional mean imputation.

Completeness as one of the four major dimensions of data quality is a pervasive issue in modern databases. Although data imputation has been studied extensively in the literature, most of the research is focused on inference-based approach. We propose to harness Web tables as an external data source to effectively and efficiently retrieve missing data while taking into account the inherent uncertainty and lack of veracity that they contain. Existing approaches mostly rely on standard retrieval techniques and out-of-the-box matching methods which result in a very low precision, especially when dealing with numerical data. We, therefore, propose a novel data imputation approach by applying numerical context similarity measures which results in a significant increase in the precision of the imputation procedure, by ensuring that the imputed values are of the same domain and magnitude as the local values, thus resulting in an accurate imputation. We use Dresden Web Table Corpus which is comprised of more than 125 million web tables extracted from the Common Crawl as our knowledge source. The comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method well outperforms the default out-of-the-box retrieval approach.