This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been
fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/JIOT.2019.2926321, IEEE Internet of
Things Journal
IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL, VOL. XX, NO. X, AUGUST 201X
Dynamic Adaptive Network-Based Fuzzy Inference
System (D-ANFIS) for the imputation of missing
data for Internet of Medical Things Applications
Hamza Turabieh, Majdi Mafarja, and Seyedali Mirjalili, Member, IEEE,
Abstract—Data delivery and acquisition are the main factors
needed for the success of any proposed Internet of Medical
Things (IoMT) systems. To achieve good performance and high
quality of services in IoMT systems, data acquisition and delivery
should be performed accurately. In general, IoMT systems are
usually vulnerable to the collected data with missing value(s)
since missing data is the main problem that affects the overall
performance of any system. This leads to a reduction in the
satisfaction level of end users. Missing data for IoMT systems
originates from a number of sources including bad connections,
outside attack or sensing errors. To obtain a high performance
in such systems, missing data should be imputed once occurred.
In this research paper, a Dynamic Adaptive Network-Based
Fuzzy Inference System (D-ANFIS) approach is proposed to
impute the missing values in a simple yet accurate manner.
The major contribution is to impute the missing value(s) once
received by dividing the collected data into two groups: complete
dataset (without missing data) and incomplete dataset (with
missing data). A holdout method is used to train the D-ANFIS
using complete data, while the incomplete dataset is used to
impute the missing value(s). Two methods are used to evaluate
the final performance of IoMT application: (i) ANFIS with
Genetic Algorithm (ANFIS-GA), and (ii) ANFIS with Particle
Swarm Optimization (ANFIS-PSO). The results show that the
performance of IoMT is enhanced 5% using ANFIS-GA and 3%
using ANFIS-PSO.
Index Terms—Missing data, ANFIS, IoMT, Particle Swarm
Optimization, Genetic Algorithm.
I. I NTRODUCTION
With the power of the telecommunication technology; bil-
lions of things (devices) become connected via internet, which
make the life easier with the set of services they provide in a
wide variety of fields (i.e. environment, home and buildings,
transportations, industries, etc). This phenomena is expressed
as Internet of Things (IoT) [1], [2]. Most of the offered
services are in the form of applications that are built on these
devices. With the use of 4G networks and 5G networks in
the forthcoming years, IoT applications recently used either
in commercial or personal use [3], [4]. In 5G networks, the
focus is on the devices rather than on the network itself
as in the previous versions of networks (4G or 3G). Thus,
a huge number of devices will be connected in the next
Hamza is with Department of Information Technology, CIT collage, Taif
Universtiy, Taif, KSA email: h.turabieh@tu.edu.sa
Majdi is with Department of Computer Science, Birzeit University, Birzeit,
Palestine email: mmafarja@birzeit.edu
Seyedali is with Institute of Integrated and Intelligent Systems,
Griffith University, Nathan, Brisbane, QLD 4111, Australia email:
seyedali.mirjalili@griffithuni.edu.au
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1
few years. With these advancements in technologies and due
to the extremely big number of connected devices in IoT,
transferring data between applications need to accomplished
using fast, secure and accurate mechanisms [5], [6]. Moreover,
the performance of IoT applications can be enhanced by
reducing the used power to transmit data between connected
devices, increase the coverage area and secure the protocol
used for connecting more devices through 5G networks.
Due the large variety of the connected devices and sensors
in IoT applications, a large quantity of data is collected to offer
an acceptable and accurate service to the end users [7]–[9]. To
make the idea clearer, let us consider the e-Health applications
as an example, which have many agents (electronics, software,
sensors, actuators and connectivity mechanisms) that facilitate
the exchange of information between the concerned people
(e.g., doctors, patients), and maybe institutions. The use of
such application to exchange information instantly and rapidly
helps in decreasing the cost of medical services and expand
the scope of medical facilities which enhances its the service
quality and enables the use of home medical care for patients.
Generally speaking, the set of the medical devices, equip-
ment, and applications that can communicate online via com-
puter networks are called Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)
[10]–[12]. The online connection between devices in IoMT
has many advantages; like saving a huge amount of time
for specialists by providing instant analysis of the patients
situation, getting the results of some earlier tests like blood
sugar level test or monitoring electrocardiogram readings for
chest pain, which can be provided at-home, in a surgery or
in a clinic. This helps in providing a quick response and the
most suitable action strategy for the individual's home health
care.
Based on the earlier discussion, we noticed that the IoMT
applications depend on the collected data from sensors and
data acquisition tools, as well as on the transition medium.
This makes those applications vulnerable to produce inac-
curate results and low performance due to many reasons,
including but not limited such as hardware problems ( i.e.
sensor problems and network devices problems ) or human
problems (i.e outside attackers or programmer errors). The
previously mentioned problems, and especially the sensor
failure problem, cause serious problems to the IoMT. The
main serious problem for IoT systems is an absent of some
important information that is required for the continuation
of those applications. Missing data is a major problem that
the causes the failure of any application and decreases its
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IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL, VOL. XX, NO. X, AUGUST 201X
performance [13], [14]. Therefore, developing a good strategy
to recover the missing data is mandatory to ensure that IoMT
systems working correctly and accurately. In Figure 1, a
general model of a general IoMT application is illustrated.
As an example, if a problem (i.e sensor fault) occurred in the
motion sensor, then intended application will not receive the
sensor’s data properly, and serious problems will be caused to
the end users (e.g., doctors) since they missed important data
about the patients situation.
The necessity to manipulate the missing value(s) in IoMT
applications to overcome the potential problems that may be
occurred, motivated our attempts to propose a new approach
that tends to fill the missing data based on dynamic ANFIS,
which considers the historical complete data that collected
by a specific sensors to predict new possible missed val-
ues. The proposed approach is tested on two well known
medical datasets:( Breast cancer dataset which is known as
Mammographic Mass dataset [15], [16], and Hepatitis dataset
[17]), that simulate IoMT applications. Both datasets suffers
from missing values that affect the performance of the IoMT
systems. Imputing missing data is an important issue to ensure
IoMT systems keep running and provide an excellent quality
of service to the customers.
The structure of this paper is organized in seven sections:
Section II presents the literature of missing data imputation
methods. Section III explores the datasets used in this paper.
Section IV shows the proposed approach to impute missing
data. Section V presents the performance measurements. In
Section VI, the experimental setup and the discussion and
comparisons of the obtained results are presented. Section VII
presents the findings and conclusion of this work.
II. L ITERATURE REVIEW
For any IoT systems, data is the main component of these
systems. As a result, data should be completely correct without
any missing value(s), and no delay while providing services
to the end users are the main aspects that play vital roles in
enhancing the performance of IoMT applications. All these
aspects are vulnerable to be destroyed when some data could
be missed, mainly when the wireless devices are used for
data collection. This is due to some reasons including but
not limited to intrusion attacks, connections errors, or sensors
fault. In literature, there exist vast literature which investigate
the imputation methods for missing data. In the following
subsections, we focus on the related works regarding missing
data problem.
A. Imputation of missing data
Unfortunately, there is no standard approach for dealing
with the missing data. Usually, the missing values are denoted
by adding some terms like N/A, missing, ?, and so on. Some
researchers just ignore the missing data if it formulate less than
5% of the whole dataset. Whilst using this approach when the
percentage of missing data is high, is not applicable, and a
recovering strategy should be applied carefully [18].
Different approaches have been discussed by different re-
searchers to solve the missing data problem in real appli-
cations. Examples of these approaches are but not limited
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2
to listwise deletion (remove all missing records), pairwise
deletion (use the correlation matrix to analysis the missing val-
ues), single imputation (randomly imputation process based on
similar record), and model-based imputation (analyse samples
of data to impute missing data). Haji-Maghsoudi et al. Magh-
soudi2018 investigated the use of Tree-Based Models (TBMs)
that based on surrogate approach (SUR) to impute missing
value(s) for a selected medical case study. They compared the
proposed approach with the statistical methods. The authors
enhanced the performance after imputing the missing data. In
addition, Suhani et al. [19] applied a hybrid approach between
fuzzy k-nearest neighbour and partial distance approach for
imputing missing value(s). In this approach, the entropy was
used to evaluate each record that contains missing values, then
the records with entropy values less than a threshold were
removed, while other missing values (for those records with
entropy values higher than a threshold) were estimated using
modied kernel-based fuzzy k-nearest neighbour algorithm. As
a result, the imputation process enhance the total performance
of the medical application. However, removing some records
from medical datasets may be critical for some IoMT appli-
cations.
A latent factor approach was employed to recover (impute)
the missing data in a real medical dataset obtained from a
hospital in central China in the period of 2013-2015 [20].
This approach was combined with a convolutional neural net-
work based multi-modal disease risk prediction (CNN-MDRP)
approach. The performance of CNN-MDRP was improved
after recovering the missing data using latent factor model.
In addition, another approach was proposed in [21]; The
authors impute missing data for Haiti earthquake dataset and
investigates the affect of missing information on environmental
systems.
B. Imputation of missing data for IoT
As discussed earlier, having missing data in a dataset has
a great impact on the IoT applications, and may cause many
problems that degrade the performance and cause a serious
problems. In literature, many exists literatures proposed to
solve missing data problem for IoT systems. Fekade et al.
[13] applied a machine learning algorithms such as : support
vector machine (SVM) and deep neural network (DNN) to
impute the missing information. The obtained results proved
the effectiveness of recovering the missing data in improving
the performance of the prediction methods based on two
different performance measurements (accuracy and root mean
square error). Another example for a successful approach
that efficiently impute the missing value(s) was investigated
by Fisher et al. [14]. A markov models were applied to
impute missing value(s) for mammographic mass dataset.
Turabieh et al. [22] proposed a dynamic layered recurrent
neural network (D-LRNN) to impute the missing data for
IoMT applications.The authors solved two medical cases that
simulates real IoT application and the performance of IoMT
application is improved after recover the missing data.
Chen et al. [23] solved incomplete data classification prob-
lem by combining a kernel function with asymmetric intrin-
sic mapping. The obtained results prove that the proposed
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Fig. 1. An example of IoMT system.

approach outperforms others on two big-data case studies. and hepatitis dataset [17], [22]. Both datasets have missing
In 2017, the quality of collected data for IoT systems was value(s) that simulate real cases from medical fields.
investigated in Sat [24] for modern cities in the field of
healthcare systems. The collected data were grouped into three
categories: missing, perfect and ambiguous data. A model
was employed to handle imperfect data that upgrade the A. Mammographic mass dataset
performance of IoT systems.
Breast cancer screening usually done by mammography,
An ST-correlated proximate method was proposed in [25]
which is the most efficient methods to detect breast cancer.
to impute the collected data that has missing value (s) for
The mammographic Mass dataset is used as IoMT dataset by
IoT system. The authors applied the method on an air pol-
several researchers [14], [22]. The dataset has 961 instances
lution dataset and showed that their method provide superior
with 5 attributes for each instance and one class attribute
performance. Another work was done by Arlitt et al. [26],
(Severity) benign or malignant. The dataset has 516 benign
that investigates the effects of having missing value(s) on IoT
instances and 445 malignant instances. Table I shows the 5
systems. The percentage of missing data was reported to be
features and their expected values [16]. It has 830 (86.37%)
1%in their application.
instances with complete data and 131 instances (13.63%) with
There types of missing date were studied by Yan et al.
missing value(s).
[27] for IoT applications. To minimize their negative impacts,
the authors proposed three models including a model of
missing data imputation based on the context and linear mean TABLE I
model (MCL), binary search model (MBS), and Gaussian D ESCRIPTION OF MAMMOGRAPHIC MASS DATASET.
mixture model (MGI). All these works show the importance of
Description and expected values
considering incomplete data to minimize its negative impacts Attribute name
Data type Range
on the performance of a given system.
BI-RADS assessment Integer [1,5]
III. DATASETS Patient age Integer [18-96]
IoMT systems used to collect data that helps the medical Mass shape Integer [1,4]
staff (i.e doctors, nurses, emergency staff, etc) to take an Mass margin Integer [1,5]
accurate decisions while examining patients. The decisions of Mass density Integer [1,4]
the medical team depend on the collected data, which should
Severity Integer [0,1]
be complete and accurate. Two different datasets are used in
this paper, which are mammographic mass dataset [14], [16],

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B. Hepatitis dataset datasets, a complete dataset and incomplete dataset. A hold

The hepatitis disease obtained from the UCI machine learn-
ing repository [16], which is used to determine if the patients
with hepatitis will survive or die. The main purpose of this
dataset is to predict the presence or absence of hepatitis disease
using several measurements that are collected from patients.
The dataset consists of 155 instances belong to either die or
lives class. The die class has 32 samples (20.6%) while live
class has 123 samples (79.4%). Each patient has 19 attributes
as shown in Table II. The dataset has many missing value(s).
TABLE II
D ESCRIPTION OF HEPATITIS DATA .
out approach is used to create ANFIS model, the complete
dataset is divided into training and testing datasets, the size
of training dataset and testing dataset is 70%and 30% from
the complete dataset, respectively. Step (4) shows the training
process for ANFIS to generate a determined model to predict
the missing value. Predicting the missing value by simulating
the generated ANFIS is done in step (5). Finally, a complete
record is achieved and moved to the complete dataset. This
process is repeated until incomplete dataset is empty. Each
time a new ANFIS is generated to fit the missing data value
that should be predicted.

Description and expected values

A. Imputation process
Attribute The imputation process works online to impute the missing
Data type Value
value(s) for the collected data. The proposed dynamic impu-
Age integer 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80
tation process is illustrated as follows.
Sex integer 1 or 2 (Male or Female)
1) Preprocessing: IoMT applications should work on-line
Steroid Boolean 0 or 1 to support the people those are using these applications. We
Antivirals Boolean 1 or 1 proposed an on-line algorithm to handle the main concept
Fatigue Boolean 2 or 1 of IoMT applications. Data preprocessing is important in
Malaise Boolean 3 or 1
understanding the collected data from sensors before using
it. Each collected record has either no missing value(s) or
Anorexia Boolean 4 or 1
suffers from some missing value(s). Two different datasets are
Liver Big Boolean 5 or 1 generated (complete dataset and incomplete dataset) based on
Liver Firm Boolean 6 or 1 the status of the collected record . This aggregation is done on-
Spleen Palpable Boolean 7 or 1 line while collecting data from sensors. The complete dataset
Spiders Boolean 8 or 1 is used to train ANFIS. The trained model of ANFIS will
impute the missing value(s) from the incomplete dataset.
Ascites Boolean 9 or 1
2) Theory of ANFIS: Adaptive Network Based Fuzzy Infer-
Varices Boolean 10 or 1
ence System (ANFIS) is an integration between fuzzy systems
Bilirubin float 0.39, 0.80, 1.20, 2.00, 3.00, 4.00 and artificial neural networks (ANN) [28]. This framework
Alk Phosphate integer 33, 80, 120, 160, 200, 250 makes the ANFIS system more accurate and overcomes the
Sgot integer 13, 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 weakness of neural networks [29], [30]. ANFIS structure
Albumin float 2.1, 3.0, 3.8, 4.5, 5.0, 6.0
has two main components: (i) logic rules (if-else) and (ii)
input-output data that combined with fuzzy which uses neural
Protime integer 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90
networks for the training process. ANFIS is model that can
Histology Boolean 0 or 1 solve nonlinear (complex) problems [31]. The ANFIS controls
Class Boolean 0 or 1 (Live or Die) the membership function and related parameters using ANN
training process [32]. The learning algorithm for ANFIS is a
combination between back-propagation learning method and
IV. M ETHODOLOGY least squares method. This structure of ANFIS is powerful to
The flowchart of the dynamic ANFIS approach is shown solve complex noisy problems[33]. For simple explanations,
in Figure 2. The developed approach runs based online mode Figure 4 shows the ANFIS architecture of two inputs (x
to impute missing value(s) while IoMT systems are running. and y) and two rules and one single output (z). A standard
The algorithm starts by collecting data from sensors which is rule of ANFIS contains logic rules (if-then) of Sugeno fuzzy
either complete record or incomplete record. If the collected model [28], [32]. For a first order two rules of Sugeno fuzzy
data is collected correctly without any missing data, then interference system, Eq.(1) and Eq.(2) show the first order two
IoMT system works correctly and no imputation process rules [34]. Where both A and B are the linguistics labels and
is performed. Genetic Algorithm (GA) or Particle Swarm fi (x, y) is the first order of Sugeno fuzzy model.
Optimization (PSO) methods were used to find the optimal
design model for ANFIS. Otherwise, the collected data may Rule 1 : if x is A1 and y is B1 then z is f1 (x, y) (1)
have one or more missing value(s). The imputation approach is
shown in Figure 3. There are six steps for imputation approach,
where it begins by collecting data from sensors, the collected Rule 2 : if x is A2 and y is B2 then z is f2 (x, y) (2)
data may have missing data (denoted by (?)). Steps (2) and (3)
is a dividing process for the collected data into two different The functions of each layer are summarized as follows:

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Fig. 2. The proposed approach.

Layer 1: Every node i is represent a square node in this
layer with a node function as shown in Eq.(3) and Eq.(4) ,
where Ai and Bi are two different linguistics labels for two
inputs (x and y). Usually µAi and µBi represents the mem-
bership functions, which are assumed to be bell shaped with
a range value between 1 and 0. Eq.(5) shows the calculations
for µAi and µBi , where ai and ci are the premise parameters
[35].
Layer 4: Every node in this layer is square node. Eq.(8)
shows the calculations of this layer, where f1 and f2 are the
fuzzy if-then rules as shown in Eq.(VII) and Eq.(11), where
pi , qi , and ri are parameters set and wi is the output of layer
3. All parameters referred to as consequent parameters.
O4,i = w̄i · fi f or i = 1, 2 (8)

O1,i = µAi (x) f or i = 1, 2 (3) O4,i = w̄i · fi = wi · (pi x + qi y + ri ) i = 1, 2 (9)

O1,i = µBi−2 (y) f or i = 3, 4 (4)

Rule 1 : if x is A1 and y is B1 then f1 = p1 x + q1 y + r1
−(xi − ci ) 2 (10)
µAi (x), µBi−2 (y) = exp (( ) ) (5)
ai
Layer 2: Every node is a circle node labeled Π, which Rule 2 : if x is A2 and y is B2 then f2 = p2 x + q2 y + r1
multiplies the received signals and directs the product out as (11)
shown in Eq.(6), where every node output express the firing P Layer 5: The signal of this node is a circle node labeled
strength of a rule. , which evaluates the final output as the summation of all
received signals as shown in Eq.(12).
O2,i = wi = µAi (x) · µBi−2 (y), i = 1, 2 (6) P
i wi · fi
X
Layer 3: Every node is a circle node labelled N , with the O5,i = f inal output = w̄i · fi = P (12)
node function to normalizes the ratio of the ith rules firing i i wi

strength to the sum of all rules firing strengths as shown in 3) Dynamic ANFIS: In this paper, a new imputation ap-
Eq.(9). proach for missing data is proposed based on ANFIS. The
wi proposed approach is trained to predict the missing value(s).
O3,i = w̄i = f or i = 1, 2 (7) The proposed approach run when incomplete dataset has a
w1 + w2

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Fig. 3. Imputation Process.

TABLE III
ANFIS PARAMETERS SETTING .

Parameters Value
Number of layers 5
Membership function Gauss
Number of iterations 300
Momentum constant 0.9
Size of input dataset Dynamic based on number of missing data
Size of output data 1
Learning rules Least square estimations
Fig. 4. ANFIS architecture of two inputs and two rules. Gradient decent algorithm

new record. A new ANFIS model will be used to impute the

missing value(s) in the new record. The imputation process
will stop if no more records in incomplete dataset and executes
again if a new incomplete record is received. This proposed
approach is simple, fast and accurate in predicting miss-
ing data. Moreover, the computational time of the proposed
method depends on on different factors such as types of the
membership function, number of layers in ANFIS model and
number of epochs. The parameters of ANFIS is controlled as
shown in Table III. The number of input layer used in this
paper is 5, which is the default structure for ANFIS. The
number of input data is dynamic based on the number of
missing variables in the incomplete record. While there is only
one single output to predict. A Gauss membership function is
used in the ANFIS model. The training of ANFIS was stopped
after 300 iterations.
B. Optimization methods
Once the collected data is complete and has no missing
data. The complete dataset is divided using holdout method to
train and simulate an ANFIS, where 70% of the data is used
for training process, while 30% are used for testing process.
The proposed ANFIS is developed either based on GA or
PSO optimization methods that are used to find the optimal
design of ANFIS model. In simple, genetic algorithms mimics
biological evolution theory where the population of solutions
is iteratively modified. After a specific number of iterations,
an optimal solution is obtained. For more explanation about
GA and its operations can be observed in [36], [37].
PSO is another population search heuristics algorithm,
where solutions (Particles ) explore the problem search space
by chasing the best current solution that are inspired by social
behaviors of birds. In a simple explanation, the past experience
if a selected particle and its surrounding is used to determine
the next movement in the search space. Each particle has two
values: position and velocity. These values are updated at each
iteration based on Eq. (13) and Eq. (14), respectively. Note
that w is a positive inertia weight, r1 and r2 are randomly
generated values in range [0,1] at each iteration, and c1 and c2
present the degree of influence of pid and pgd on the particles
velocity, respectively. To control the velocity from flying out
of the feasible search space, the velocity v is bounded within a
range of [vmin , vmax ]. Every newly visited position represents
a new solution, which is also used for updating the global best
solution pg. For more explanation about PSO, readers can read
[38]–[40].

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A. Results of mammographic Mass problem

vid (t+1) = w(t)vid (t)+c1 r1 [pid (t)−xid .(t)]+c2 r2 [pgd (t)−xid (t)].The obtained results before imputing missing data and after
(13) imputing missing data based on AUC value are shown in
Table VII. It is obvious from the results that imputing missing
xid (t + 1) = xid (t) + vid (t + 1). (14) value(s) enhanced the final performance for both classifiers
ANFIS-GA and ANFIS-PSO. For example, the average value
In this research, the optimization methods GA and PSO using ANFIS-GA approach is enhanced 1% after imputing
are used to improve ANFIS performance by controlling its missing data. This improvement even if it is small but it helps
parameters in the MFs to obtain the lowest prediction error. the IoMT applications to perform well and keep running and
The fitness function is the mean square error (MSE) between not suffer from missing data problem.
the actual and predicted values as shown in Eq.(15). Where Figures 5, 6 show the boxplot diagrams for both models
n is number of measurements used in the experiments, y and ANFIS-GA and ANFIS-PSO. It is clear that from both Figures
ŷ are the actual and predicted values, respectively. Table IV that the overall performance after imputing missing data is
shows the parameters setting for GA and PSO methods. enhanced based on AUC value. Moreover, based on the upper
n quartile values, we can see that ANFIS-PSO is able to improve
1X
M SE = (yi − yˆi )2 (15) the performance of the classifier more than ANFIS-GA with
n i=1 an excellent value of AUC value.

TABLE IV
GA AND PSO PARAMETERS SETTING .

GA Parameters Value
Number of generations 300
Population size 50
Mutation rate 0.3
Crossover rate 0.7
Selection type Roulette wheel selection
PSO Parameters Value
Population size 50
Number of generations 300
w 1 Fig. 5. Boxplots for mammographic mass results using ANFIS-GA.

c1 2
c2 2

V. P ERFORMANCE M EASURE
Area Under the receiver operating characteristics Curve
(AUC) criteria is used to evaluate the proposed D-ANFIS
approach. A binary classification method, that predicts two
categories: faulty (0) or non-faulty (1). In General, the binary
classifier generates two possible values (errors): false negative
(FN) and false positive (FP) and two different expected values
are true negative (TN) and true positive (TP). All measure-
ments can be evaluated based on confusion matrix format for
binary classification as shown in Table V. The range of AUC
values for binary classification are explored in Table VI.
Fig. 6. Boxplots for mammographic mass results using ANFIS-PSO.
VI. R ESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
The computer program was evaluated using MAtLAB (ver-
sion R2014a) environment by using the fuzzy toolbox. A D- B. Results of Hepatitis problem
ANFIS is used to impute the missing value(s) for two IoMT Hepatitis problem is a larger case compared to mammo-
datasets (mammographic mass and hepatitis datasets). For each graphic masses problem. Table VIII explores the obtained
problem, 11 experiments were performed. Mammographic results for using ANFIS-GA and ANFIS-PSO. It is clear that
Mass case is a simple case study due to the small number ANFIS-GA enhanced the average of AUC 5% after imputing
of attributes, while hepatitis dataset is a big case study since missing data. While ANFIS-PSO enhances the performance
it has 19 attributes. 3% based on the AUC average value. Moreover, ANFIS-GA

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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/JIOT.2019.2926321, IEEE Internet of
Things Journal
IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL, VOL. XX, NO. X, AUGUST 201X 8

TABLE V
C ONFUSION MATRIX .

Estimated Class
Data Class = Yes Data Class = No
Actual Class Data Class = Yes True Positive (TP) False Negative (FN)
Data Class = No False Positive (FP) True Negative (TN)

TABLE VI
T HE RANGE OF AUC VALUES FOR BINARY CLASSIFIER .

Range
AUC < 0.50
0.50 ≤ AUC < 0.60
0.60 ≤ AUC < 0.70
0.70 ≤ AUC < 0.80
0.80 ≤ AUC < 0.90
0.90 ≤ AUC ≤ 1.00
Descriptions
means bad results
means poor results
means fair results
means acceptable results
means excellent results
means outstanding results

has a stable performance based on average, best, worst and

median results after imputing missing data, while ANFIS-GA
without imputing missing data, the obtained results show a
higher gap between reported results. However, the best value
before imputing missing data is higher (0.8864) than after
imputing missing data (0.8529), but both results are still in
an excellent range based for AUC values based on Table VIII.
Figures 7 and 8 explore the boxplots for hepatitis dataset
for 11 experiments, which illustrate the AUC values. The
performance of ANFIS-GA is enhanced after imputing missing
data. Moreover, the performance of ANFIS-GA is better than
the performance of ANFIS-GA. Obviously, it is observed that
imputing missing value(s) can improve the performance of the
proposed classifier in IoMT applications.
Fig. 8. Boxplots for hepatitis results using ANFIS-PSO.
VII. C ONCLUSION AND F UTURE W ORK
We proposed a Dynamic Adaptive Network-Based Fuzzy
Inference System (D-ANFIS) to impute missing data for IoMT
applications. Low quality of data delivery will decrease the
performance and availability of IoMT systems. Moreover,
missing data may stop the provided service(s) to the end users.
In this paper, two medical cases were discussed: Mammo-
graphic mass and Hepatitis datasets. Both cases simulate IoMT
applications and have missing data. Several experiments were
performed with and without imputing missing data. ANFIS-
GA and ANFIS-PSO were used to simulate the performance
of the binary classification before and after imputing missing
data. The obtained results showed that the proposed imputation
process is beneficial in improving the overall performance of
IoMT applications based on the AUC value.
There is still plenty of room in conducting researches on
the imputation process for IoMT applications. We will conduct
deeply the performance of ANFIS in different training scenar-
ios. Furthermore, a deep investigation of IoMT applications
such as the aggregation process of different data type from
different sensors and data security inside IoMT systems is
recommended.

Fig. 7. Boxplots for hepatitis results using ANFIS-GA.
The main finding of this research is that the imputation
method integrated with prediction approaches is able to en-
hance the performance of IoMT applications. In general,
missing data decrease the performance and accuracy of IoMT
systems, while imputing missing value(s) improve the perfor-
mance of keep IoMT systems running smoothly.
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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/JIOT.2019.2926321, IEEE Internet of
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Hamza Turabieh is an associate professor at In-

formation Technology department- College of Com-
puters and Information Technology- Taif University,
Saudi Arabia. Turabieh received his B.S., M.Sc.
degrees in Computer Science from Balqa Applied
University in 2004 and 2006 respectively in Jordan.
Turabieh obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science
from National University of Malaysia (UKM) in
2010 - Malaysia. His research interests and activ-
ities lie at the interface of Computer Science and
Operational Research. Intelligent decision support
systems, search and optimization (combinatorial optimization, constraint op-
timization, multi-modal optimization and multi-objective optimization) using
heuristics, local search, meta-heuristics (in particular memetic algorithms,
particle swarm optimization), hybrid approaches and their theoretical foun-
dations. Minor interest in machine learning, computational geometry, pattern
recognition, IoT, intelligent user-interfaces and Bioinformatics.

Majdi Mafarja received his B.Sc in Software En-

gineering and M.Sc in Computer Information Sys-
tems from Philadelphia University and The Arab
Academy for Banking and Financial Sciences, Jor-
dan in 2005 and 2007 respectively. Dr. Mafarja did
his PhD in Computer Science at National University
of Malaysia (UKM). He was a member in Datamin-
ing and Optimization Research Group (DMO). Now
he is an Associate Professor at the Department of
Computer Science at Birzeit University. His research
interests include Evolutionary Computation, Meta-
heuristics and Data mining.

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