# 3  Missing Data

## 3.1 Types of Missing Data

• Missing completely at random (MCAR)
• Missing at random (MAR)1
• Informative missing (non-ignorable non-response)
A
• 1 “Although missing at random (MAR) is a non-testable assumption, it has been pointed out in the literature that we can get very close to MAR if we include enough variables in the imputation models” Harel & Zhou (2007).

• See Carpenter & Smuk (2021), Schafer & Graham (2002), Donders et al. (2006), Harel & Zhou (2007), Allison (2001), White et al. (2011), Stef Buuren (2012) for an introduction to missing data and imputation concepts.

## 3.2 Prelude to Modeling

• Quantify extent of missing data
• Characterize types of subjects with missing data
• Find sets of variables that are missing on same subjects
B

## 3.3 Missing Values for Different Types of Response Variables

• Serial data with subjects dropping out (not covered in this course2
• $$Y$$=time to event, follow-up curtailed: covered under survival analysis3
• Often discard observations with completely missing $$Y$$ but sometimes wasteful4
• Characterize missings in $$Y$$ before dropping obs.
C
• 2 Twisk et al. (2013) found instability in using multiple imputation of longitudinal data, and advantages of using instead full likelihood models.

• 3 White & Royston (2009) provide a method for multiply imputing missing covariate values using censored survival time data.

• 4 $$Y$$ is so valuable that if one is only missing a $$Y$$ value, imputation is not worthwhile, and imputation of $$Y$$ is not advised if MCAR or MAR.

• ## 3.4 Problems With Simple Alternatives to Imputation

Deletion of records—

• Badly biases parameter estimates when the probability of a case being incomplete is related to $$Y$$ and not just $$X$$ .
• Deletion because of a subset of $$X$$ being missing always results in inefficient estimates
• Deletion of records with missing $$Y$$ can result in biases but is the preferred approach under MCAR5
• von Hippel (2007) found advantages to a “use all variables to impute all variables then drop observations with missing $$Y$$” approach (but see Sullivan et al. (2015))
• Lee & Carlin (2012) suggest that observations missing on both $$Y$$ and on a predictor of major interest are not helpful
• MCAR can be justified
• Rarely missing predictor of overriding importance that can’t be imputed from other data
• Fraction of obs. with missings small and $$n$$ is large
• No advantage of deletion except savings of analyst time
• Making up missing data better than throwing away real data
• See Knol et al. (2010)
D
• 5 Multiple imputation of $$Y$$ in that case does not improve the analysis and assumes the imputation model is correct.

• Adding extra categories of categorical predictors—

• Including missing data but adding a category missing’ causes serious biases
• Problem acute when values missing because subject too sick
• Difficult to interpret
• Fails even under MCAR
• May be OK if values are “missing” because of “not applicable”6
E
• 6 E.g. you have a measure of marital happiness, dichotomized as high or low, but your sample contains some unmarried people. OK to have a 3-category variable with values high, low, and unmarried—Paul Allison, IMPUTE list, 4Jul09.

• Likewise, serious problems are caused by setting missing continuous predictors to a constant (e.g., zero) and adding an indicator variable to try to estimate the effect of missing values.

Two examples from Donders et al. (2006) using binary logistic regression, $$N=500$$.

Results of 1000 Simulations With $$\beta_{1}=1.0$$ with MAR and Two Types of Imputation

F
Imputation $$\hat{\beta}_{1}$$ S.E. Coverage of
Method 0.90 C.I.
Single 0.989 0.09 0.64
Multiple 0.989 0.14 0.90

Now consider a simulation with $$\beta_{1}=1, \beta_{2}=0$$, $$X_{2}$$ correlated with $$X_{1} (r=0.75)$$ but redundant in predicting $$Y$$, use missingness indicator when $$X_{1}$$ is MCAR in 0.4 of 500 subjects. This is also compared with grand mean fill-in imputation.

Results of 1000 Simulations Adding a Third Predictor Indicating Missing for $$X_{1}$$}

G
Imputation $$\hat{\beta}_{1}$$ $$\hat{\beta}_{2}$$
Method
Indicator 0.55 0.51
Overall mean 0.55

In the incomplete observations the constant $$X_{1}$$ is uncorrelated with $$X_{2}$$.

## 3.5 Strategies for Developing an Imputation Model

The goal of imputation is to preserve the information and meaning of the non-missing data.

There is a full Bayesian modeling alternative to all the methods presented below. The Bayesian approach requires more effort but has several advantages .

Exactly how are missing values estimated?

• Could ignore all other information — random or grand mean fill-in
• Can use external info not used in response model (e.g., zip code for income)
• Need to utilize reason for non-response if possible
• Use statistical model with sometimes-missing $$X$$ as response variable
• Model to estimate the missing values should include all variables that are either
HI
1. related to the missing data mechanism;
2. have distributions that differ between subjects that have the target variable missing and those that have it measured;
3. associated with the sometimes-missing variable when it is not missing; or
4. included in the final response model
• Ignoring imputation results in biased $$\hat{V}(\hat{\beta})$$
• transcan function in Hmisc library: “optimal” transformations of all variables to make residuals more stable and to allow non-monotonic transformations
• aregImpute function in Hmisc: good approximation to full Bayesian multiple imputation procedure using the bootstrap
• transcan and aregImpute use the following for fitting imputation models:
J
1. initialize NAs to median (mode for categoricals)
2. expand all categorical predictors using dummy variables
3. expand all continuous predictors using restricted cubic splines
4. optionally optimally transform the variable being predicted by expanding it with restricted cubic splines and using the first canonical variate (multivariate regression) as the optimum transformation (maximizing $$R^2$$)
5. one-dimensional scoring of categorical variables being predicted using canonical variates on dummy variables representing the categories (Fisher’s optimum scoring algorithm); when imputing categories, solve for which category yields a score that is closest to the predicted score
• aregImpute and transcan work with fit.mult.impute to make final analysis of response variable relatively easy
• Predictive mean matching : replace missing value with observed value of subject having closest predicted value to the predicted value of the subject with the NA. Key considerations are how to
K
1. model the target when it is not NA
2. match donors on predicted values
3. avoid overuse of “good” donors to disallow excessive ties in imputed data
4. account for all uncertainties
• Predictive model for each target uses any outcomes, all predictors in the final model other than the target, plus auxiliary variables not in the outcome model
• No distributional assumptions; nicely handles target variables with strange distributions
• Predicted values need only be monotonically related to real predictive values
• PMM can result in some donor observations being used repeatedly
• Causes lumpy distribution of imputed values
• Address by sampling from multinomial distribution, probabilities = scaled distance of all predicted values to predicted value ($$y^{*}$$) of observation needing imputing
• Tukey’s tricube function is a good weighting function (used in loess): $$w_{i} = (1 - \min(d_{i}/s, 1)^{3})^{3}$$,
$$d_{i} = |\hat{y_{i}} - y^{*}|$$
$$s = 0.2\times\text{mean} |\hat{y_{i}} - y^{*}|$$ is a good default scale factor
scale so that $$\sum w_{i} = 1$$
• Recursive partitioning with surrogate splits — handles case where a predictor of a variable needing imputation is missing itself. But there are problems even with completely random missingness.
• White et al. (2011) discusses an alternative method based on choosing a donor observation at random from the $$q$$ closest matches ($$q=3$$, for example)
L

### 3.5.1 Interactions

• When interactions are in the outcome model, oddly enough it may be better to treat interaction terms as “just another variable” and do unconstrained imputation of them
M

## 3.6 Single Conditional Mean Imputation

• Can fill-in using unconditional mean or median if number of missings low and $$X$$ is unrelated to other $$X$$s
• Otherwise, first approximation to good imputation uses other $$X$$s to predict a missing $$X$$
• This is a single “best guess” conditional mean
• $$\hat{X}_{j} = Z \hat{\theta}, Z = X_{\bar j}$$ plus possibly auxiliary variables that precede $$X_{j}$$ in the causal chain that are not intended to be in the outcome model.
Cannot include $$Y$$ in $$Z$$ without adding random errors to imputed values as done with multiple imputation (would steal info from $$Y$$)
• Recursive partitioning can sometimes be helpful for nonparametrically estimating conditional means
N

## 3.8 Multiple Imputation

• Single imputation could use a random draw from the conditional distribution for an individual
$$\hat{X}_{j} = Z \hat{\theta} + \hat{\epsilon}, Z = [X\bar{j}, Y]$$ plus auxiliary variables
$$\hat{\epsilon} = n(0, \hat{\sigma})$$ or a random draw from the calculated residuals
• bootstrap
• approximate Bayesian bootstrap : sample with replacement from sample with replacement of residuals
• Multiple imputations ($$M$$) with random draws
• Draw sample of $$M$$ residuals for each missing value to be imputed
• Average $$M$$ $$\hat{\beta}$$
• In general can provide least biased estimates of $$\beta$$
• Simple formula for imputation-corrected var($$\hat{\beta}$$)
Function of average “apparent” variances and between-imputation variances of $$\hat{\beta}$$
• Even when the $$\chi^2$$ distribution is a good approximation when data have no missing values, the $$t$$ or $$F$$ distributions are needed to have accurate $$P$$-values and confidence limits when there are missings
• BUT full multiple imputation needs to account for uncertainty in the imputation models by refitting these models for each of the $$M$$ draws
• transcan does not do that; aregImpute does
• Note that multiple imputation can and should use the response variable for imputing predictors
• aregImpute algorithm
• Takes all aspects of uncertainty into account using the bootstrap
• Different bootstrap resamples used for each imputation by fitting a flexible additive model on a sample with replacement from the original data
• This model is used to predict all of the original missing and non-missing values for the target variable for the current imputation
• Uses flexible parametric additive regression models to impute
• There is an option to allow target variables to be optimally transformed, even non-mono-ton-ical-ly (but this can overfit)
• By default uses predictive mean matching for imputation; no residuals required (can also do more parametric regression imputation)
• By default uses weighted PMM; many other matching options
• Uses by default van~Buuren’s “Type 1” matching to capture the right amount of uncertainty by computing predicted values for missing values using a regression fit on the bootstrap sample, and finding donor observations by matching those predictions to predictions from potential donors using the regression fit from the original sample of complete observations
• When a predictor of the target variable is missing, it is first imputed from its last imputation when it was a target variable
• First 3 iterations of process are ignored (“burn-in”)
• Compares favorably to R MICE approach
• Example:
OP
Code
a <- aregImpute(~ age + sex + bp + death + heart.attack.before.death,
data=mydata, n.impute=5)
f <- fit.mult.impute(death ~ rcs(age,3) + sex +
rcs(bp,5), lrm, a, data=mydata)

See Barzi & Woodward (2004) for a nice review of multiple imputation with detailed comparison of results (point estimates and confidence limits for the effect of the sometimes-missing predictor) for various imputation methods. Barnes et al. (2006) have a good overview of imputation methods and a comparison of bias and confidence interval coverage for the methods when applied to longitudinal data with a small number of subjects. Horton & Kleinman (2007) have a good review of several software packages for dealing with missing data, and a comparison of them with aregImpute. Harel & Zhou (2007) provide a nice overview of multiple imputation and discuss some of the available software. White & Carlin (2010) studied bias of multiple imputation vs. complete-case analysis. White et al. (2011) provide much practical guidance.

Caution: Methods can generate imputations having very reasonable distributions but still not having the property that final response model regression coefficients have nominal confidence interval coverage. It is worth checking that imputations generate the correct collinearities among covariates.

• With MICE and aregImpute we are using the chained equation approach
• Chained equations handles a wide variety of target variables to be imputed and allows for multiple variables to be missing on the same subject
• Iterative process cycles through all target variables to impute all missing values
• Does not attempt to use the full Bayesian multivariate model for all target variables, making it more flexible and easy to use
• Possible to create improper imputations, e.g., imputing conflicting values for different target variables
• However, simulation studies demonstrate very good performance of imputation based on chained equations
QR

## 3.9 Diagnostics

• MCAR can be partially assessed by comparing distribution of non-missing $$Y$$ for those subjects with complete $$X$$ vs. those subjects having incomplete $$X$$
• Yucel and Zaslavsky (Yucel & Zaslavsky, 2008; see also He & Zaslavsky, 2012)
• Interested in reasonableness of imputed values for a sometimes-missing predictor $$X_{j}$$
• Duplicate entire dataset
• In the duplicated observations set all non-missing values of $$X_{j}$$ to missing; let $$w$$ denote this set of observations set to missing
• Develop imputed values for the missing values of $$X_{j}$$
• In the observations in $$w$$ compare the distribution of imputed $$X_{j}$$ to the original values of $$X_{j}$$
• Bondarenko & Raghunathan (2016) present a variety of useful diagnostics on the reasonableness of imputed values.
S

## 3.10 Summary and Rough Guidelines

T
Table 3.1: Summary of methods for dealing with missing values
Method: Deletion Single Multiple
Allows non-random missing x x
Reduces sample size x
Apparent S.E. of $$\hat{\beta}$$ too low x
Increases real S.E. of $$\hat{\beta}$$ x
$$\hat{\beta}$$ biased if not MCAR x

The following contains crude guidelines. Simulation studies are needed to refine the recommendations. Here $$f$$ refers to the proportion of observations having any variables missing.

• $$f < 0.03$$: It doesn’t matter very much how you impute missings or whether you adjust variance of regression coefficient estimates for having imputed data in this case. For continuous variables imputing missings with the median non-missing value is adequate; for categorical predictors the most frequent category can be used. Complete case analysis is also an option here. Multiple imputation may be needed to check that the simple approach “worked.”
• $$f \geq 0.03$$: Use multiple imputation with number of imputations7 equal to $$\max(5, 100f)$$. Fewer imputations may be possible with very large sample sizes. See statisticalhorizons.com/how-many-imputations. Type 1 predictive mean matching is usually preferred, with weighted selection of donors. Account for imputation in estimating the covariance matrix for final parameter estimates. Use the $$t$$ distribution instead of the Gaussian distribution for tests and confidence intervals, if possible, using the estimated d.f. for the parameter estimates.
• Multiple predictors frequently missing: More imputations may be required. Perform a “sensitivity to order” analysis by creating multiple imputations using different orderings of sometimes missing variables. It may be beneficial to initially sort variables so that the one with the most NAs will be imputed first.
U
• 7 White et al. (2011) recommend choosing $$M$$ so that the key inferential statistics are very reproducible should the imputation analysis be repeated. They suggest the use of $$100f$$ imputations. See also . von Hippel (2016) finds that the number of imputations should be quadratically increasing with the fraction of missing information.

• V

Reason for missings more important than number of missing values.

Extreme amount of missing data does not prevent one from using multiple imputation, because alternatives are worse .

### 3.10.1 Effective Sample Size

It is useful to look look at examples of effective sample sizes in the presence of missing data. If a sample of 1000 subjects contains various amounts and patterns of missings what size $$n_c$$ of a complete sample would have equivalent information for the intended purpose of the analysis?

1. A new marker was collected on a random sample of 200 of the subjects and one wants to estimate the added predictive value due to the marker: $$n_{c}=200$$
2. Height is missing on 100 subjects but we want to study association between BMI and outcome. Weight, sex, and waist circumference are available on all subjects: $$n_{c}=980$$
3. Each of 10 predictors is randomly missing on $$\frac{1}{10}$$ of subjects, and the predictors are uncorrelated with each other and are each weakly related to the outcome: $$n_{c}=500$$
4. Same as previous but the predictors can somewhat be predicted from non-missing predictors: $$n_{c}=750$$
5. The outcome variable was not assessed on a random $$\frac{1}{5}$$ of subjects: $$n_{c}=800$$
6. The outcome represents sensitive information, is missing on $$\frac{1}{2}$$ of subjects, and we don’t know what made subjects respond to the question: $$n_{c}=0$$ (serious selection bias)
7. One of the baseline variables was collected prospectively $$\frac{1}{2}$$ of the time and for the other subjects it was retrospectively estimated only for subjects ultimately suffering a stroke and we don’t know which subjects had a stroke: $$n_{c}=0$$ (study not worth doing)
8. The outcome variable was assessed by emailing the 1000 subjects, for which 800 responded, and we don’t know what made subjects respond: $$n_{c}=0$$ (model will possibly be very biased—at least the intercept)
W

## 3.11 Bayesian Methods for Missing Data

• Multiple imputation developed as an approximation to a full Bayesian model
• Full Bayesian model treats missings as unknown parameters and provides exact inference and correct measures of uncertainty
• See this case study for an example
• The case study also shows how to do “posterior stacking” if you want to avoid having to specify a full model for missings, and instead use usual multiple imputations as described in this chapter
• Run a multiple imputation algorithm
• For each completed dataset run the Bayesian analysis and draw thousands of samples from the posterior distribution of the parameters
• Pool all these posterior draws over all the multiple imputations and do posterior inference as usual with no special correction required
• Made easy by the Hmisc package aregImpute function and the rms stackMI` function as demonstrated in the Titanic case study later in the notes.
X