Product failure prediction with missing data using graph neural networks

In real-world production data, missing values often occur randomly or systematically with various missing patterns. Missing values need to be handled properly to build effective prediction models. This paper presents a novel method based on graph representation and graph neural networks for improving prediction in missing value conditions. To utilize the entire information of a training dataset without direct manipulation, all instances of the dataset are represented as graphs of varying sizes, in which nodes and edges represent the observed input variables and their pairwise relationships. Prediction models learn from the graph representations. These models can make predictions of unknown labels for new instances that have arbitrary missing patterns. The superiority of the proposed method was investigated on seven different product failure prediction tasks from a home appliance manufacturer. The proposed method outperformed all other methods in six of the seven tasks.