The control of blast furnace ironmaking process requires model of process dynamics accurate enough to facilitate the control strategies. However, data sets collected from blast furnace contain considerable number of missing values and outliers. These values can significantly affect subsequent statistical analysis and thus the identification of the whole process, so it becomes much important to deal with these values. This paper considers a data processing procedure including missing value imputation and outlier detection, and examines the impact of processing to the identification of blast furnace ironmaking process. Missing values are imputed based on the decision tree algorithm and outliers are identified and discarded through a set of multivariate outlier detection methods. The data sets before and after processing are then used for identification. Two classic identification methods, N4SID (numerical algorithms for state space subspace system identification) and PEM (prediction error method) are considered and a comparative study is presented. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.