Rapidminer / Excel Missing Value Replacement

Question

Im learning how to use Rapidminer for a project. Im stuck at some point. I have a dataset as follows: There are countries. For each country Im keeping track of some values (medals lets say) for years 1990-2012. As an example:

• Country Year Gold Silver Bronze

  ---

  USA      1990    10      5         7
  .....
  USA      2012    12      3         8
  Spain    1990    8       12        9
  ...
  Spain    1992    7       ?         8
  ....
  Spain    2012    4       11        12
  ...GOES ON...
  

What I want to do is to replace the missing values. For example Spain has a missing value in 1992 for Silver Medals. I want to find the average for Silver data available for Spain and replace the missing value with that. How can I do this? If the present modules in Rapidminer not able to do this, is there some kind of macro etc? I can also use Excel to preprocess the data (but how)???.

Answer 1

Use the Replace Missing Values operator. Its default settings fill any missing data with the average of that column - exactly what you want.