Predicting Missing Values in Survey Data Using Prompt Engineering for Addressing Item Non-Response

Abstract

Survey data play a crucial role in various research fields, including economics, education, and healthcare, by providing insights into human behavior and opinions. However, item non-response, where respondents fail to answer specific questions, presents a significant challenge by creating incomplete datasets that undermine data integrity and can hinder or even prevent accurate analysis. Traditional methods for addressing missing data, such as statistical imputation techniques and deep learning models, often fall short when dealing with the rich linguistic content of survey data. These approaches are also hampered by high time complexity for training and the need for extensive preprocessing or feature selection. In this paper, we introduce an approach that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) through prompt engineering for predicting item non-responses in survey data. Our method combines the strengths of both traditional imputation techniques and deep learning methods with the advanced linguistic understanding of LLMs. By integrating respondent similarities, question relevance, and linguistic semantics, our approach enhances the accuracy and comprehensiveness of survey data analysis. The proposed method bypasses the need for complex preprocessing and additional training, making it adaptable, scalable, and capable of generating explainable predictions in natural language. We evaluated the effectiveness of our LLM-based approach through a series of experiments, demonstrating its competitive performance against established methods such as Multivariate Imputation by Chained Equations (MICE), MissForest, and deep learning models like TabTransformer. The results show that our approach not only matches but, in some cases, exceeds the performance of these methods while significantly reducing the time required for data processing.