In plain words: To fill a missing value, it randomly picks one from the k most similar units instead of averaging them like the usual neighbor-based filler. Theory shows this recovers the whole spread of possible values, not just the middle one.
Abstract · kNNSampler: Stochastic Imputations for Recovering Missing Value Distributions
We study a missing-value imputation method, termed kNNSampler, that imputes a given unit's missing response by randomly sampling from the observed responses of the $k$ most similar units to the given unit in terms of the observed covariates. This method can sample unknown missing values from their distributions, quantify the uncertainties of missing values, and be readily used for multiple imputation. Unlike popular kNNImputer, which estimates the conditional mean of a missing response given an observed covariate, kNNSampler is theoretically shown to estimate the conditional distribution of a missing response given an observed covariate. Experiments illustrate the performance of kNNSampler. The code for kNNSampler is made publicly available (https://github.com/SAP/knn-sampler).
Parastoo Pashmchi, Jérôme Benoit, Motonobu Kanagawa
arXiv:2509.08366 · stat.ML, cs.LG, math.ST, stat.ME · submitted Sep 10, 2025 · updated Dec 2, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Published in Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR). Reviewed on OpenReview: https://openreview.net/forum?id=4CDnIACCQG