Imputation of Missing Demographic Data in the decide.pe Survey: A First Approach
Description
The dataset was taken from the responses provided by users who completed the decide.pe survey. The responses (n=24851) were submitted between the 14th of march 2026 and the 12th of april 2026. The participants were asked to provide information regarding their geographic location, gender, age, and education. It was not mandatory to respond to the four questions, which led to many gaps in the demographic information. We imputed in a first round the following demographics aspects: age, gender and education. The missing data regarding age was reduced by 4.6% using XGBoost; the best model had an MAE of 7.383, an MSE of 103.466, and an R² of 0.366. The missing data in the gender column was reduced by 2.9%, also using XGBoost; the best model had a macro F1-score of 0.471. Finally, the missing data in the education column was reduced by 4.6% using a Random Forest model, with an F1-score of 0.397. The columns gender, region, age, and education represent the raw data. The columns responses_x_x are the quiz answers. The imputed values are in the columns prediction_x (e.g. prediction_age). The columns x_imputed (e.g. age_imputed) contain the merged values from the raw data and the imputed values. In a second version of this dataset, an imputation of the geographic data is planned.
Files
Steps to reproduce
Code will be available.