An Adversarially Robust Formulation of Linear Regression with Missing Data

Abstract

We present a robust framework to perform linear regression with missing entries in the features. By considering an elliptical data distribution, and specifically a multivariate normal model, we are able to conditionally formulate a distribution for the missing entries and present a robust framework, which minimizes the worst-case error caused by the uncertainty in the missing data. We show that the proposed formulation, which naturally takes into account the dependency between different variables, ultimately reduces to a convex program, for which we develop a customized and scalable solver. We analyze the consistency and structural behavior of the proposed framework in asymptotic regimes, and present technical discussions to estimate the required input parameters. We complement our analysis with experiments performed on synthetic, semi-synthetic, and real data, and show how the proposed formulation improves the prediction accuracy and robustness, and outperforms the competing techniques.

Keywords: Robustness, Missing data

JEL Classification: C13