Systematic mapping study of missing values techniques in software engineering data

Missing Values (MV) present a serious problem facing research in software engineering (SE) which is mainly based on statistical and/or data mining analysis of SE data. The simple method of dealing with MV is to ignore data with missing observations. This leads to losing valuable information and then obtaining biased results. Therefore, various techniques have been developed to deal adequately with MV, especially those based on imputation methods. In this paper, a systematic mapping study was carried out to summarize the existing techniques dealing with MV in SE datasets and to classify the selected studies according to six classification criteria: research type, research approach, MV technique, MV type, data types and MV objective. Publication channels and trends were also identified. As results, 35 papers concerning MV treatments of SE data were selected. This study shows an increasing interest in machine learning (ML) techniques especially the K-nearest neighbor algorithm (KNN) to deal with MV in SE datasets and found that most of the MV techniques are used to serve software development effort estimation techniques.