Imputation is a prominent strategy when dealing with missing values (MVs) in proteomics data analysis pipelines. However, it is difficult to assess the performance of different imputation methods and varies strongly depending on data characteristics. To overcome this issue, we present the concept of a data-driven selection of an imputation algorithm (DIMA). The performance and broad applicability of DIMA are demonstrated on 142 quantitative proteomics data sets from the PRoteomics IDEntifications (PRIDE) database and on simulated data consisting of 5-50% MVs with different proportions of missing not at random and missing completely at random values. DIMA reliably suggests a high-performing imputation algorithm, which is always among the three best algorithms and results in a root mean square error difference (ΔRMSE) ≤ 10% in 80% of the cases. DIMA implementation is available in MATLAB at github.com/kreutz-lab/OmicsData and in R at github.com/kreutz-lab/DIMAR.
Keywords: accuracy; imputation; mass spectrometry; missing values; proteomics.