This article introduces the Python package gcimpute for missing data imputation. gcimpute can impute missing data with many different variable types, including continuous, binary, ordinal, count, and truncated values, by modeling data as samples from a Gaussian copula model. This semiparametric model learns the marginal distribution of each variable to match the empirical distribution, yet describes the interactions between variables with a joint Gaussian that enables fast inference, imputation with confidence intervals, and multiple imputation. The package also provides specialized extensions to handle large datasets (with complexity linear in the number of observations) and streaming datasets (with online imputation). This article describes the underlying methodology and demonstrates how to use the software package.
This paper describes the R package imputeTestbench that provides a testbench for comparing imputation methods for missing data in univariate time series. The imputeTestbench package can be used to simulate the amount and type of missing data in a complete dataset and compare filled data using different imputation methods. The user has the option to simulate missing data by removing observations completely at random or in blocks of different sizes. Several default imputation methods are included with the package, including historical means, linear interpolation, and last observation carried for…
In many contexts, missing data and disclosure control are ubiquitous and challenging issues. In particular at statistical agencies, the respondent-level data they collect from surveys and censuses can suffer from high rates of missingness. Furthermore, agencies are obliged to protect respondents' privacy when publishing the collected data for public use. The NPBayesImputeCat R package, introduced in this paper, provides routines to i) create multiple imputations for missing data, and ii) create synthetic data for statistical disclosure control, for multivariate categorical data, with or withou…
The treatment of missing data can be difficult in multilevel research because state-of-the-art procedures such as multiple imputation (MI) may require advanced statistical knowledge or a high degree of familiarity with certain statistical software. In the missing data literature, pan has been recommended for MI of multilevel data. In this article, we provide an introduction to MI of multilevel missing data using the R package pan, and we discuss its possibilities and limitations in accommodating typical questions in multilevel research. In order to make pan more accessible to applied researche…
Multiple imputation by chained equations (MICE) has emerged as a popular approach for handling missing data. A central challenge for applying MICE is determining how to incorporate outcome information into covariate imputation models, particularly for complicated outcomes. Often, we have a particular analysis model in mind, and we would like to ensure congeniality between the imputation and analysis models. We propose a novel strategy for directly incorporating the analysis model into the handling of missing data. In our proposed approach, multiple imputations of missing covariates are obtaine…
Not-at-random missingness presents a challenge in addressing missing data in many health research applications. In this paper, we propose a new approach to account for not-at-random missingness after multiple imputation through weighted analysis of stacked multiple imputations. The weights are easily calculated as a function of the imputed data and assumptions about the not-at-random missingness. We demonstrate through simulation that the proposed method has excellent performance when the missingness model is correctly specified. In practice, the missingness mechanism will not be known. We sho…
Robust variance estimation for multiple imputation using predictive mean matching or parametric imputation models
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；Wake Forest University（维克森林大学）；Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute（凯撒永久华盛顿健康研究所）；Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center（弗雷德·哈钦森癌症中心）
Missing data on response variables are common in clinical studies. Corresponding to the uncertainty of missing mechanism, theoretical frameworks on controlled imputation have been developed. In practice, it is recommended to conduct a statistically valid analysis under the primary assumptions on missing data, followed by sensitivity analysis under alternative assumptions to assess the robustness of results. Due to the availability of software, controlled multiple imputation (MI) procedures, including delta-based and reference-based approaches, have become popular for analyzing continuous varia…
Given the prevalence of missing data in modern statistical research, a broad range of methods is available for any given imputation task. How does one choose the `best' imputation method in a given application? The standard approach is to select some observations, set their status to missing, and compare prediction accuracy of the methods under consideration of these observations. Besides having to somewhat artificially mask observations, a shortcoming of this approach is that imputations based on the conditional mean will rank highest if predictive accuracy is measured with quadratic loss. In…
Imputing missing values is an important preprocessing step in data analysis, but the literature offers little guidance on how to choose between different imputation models. This letter suggests adopting the imputation model that generates a density of imputed values most similar to those of the observed values for an incomplete variable after balancing all other covariates. We recommend stable balancing weights as a practical approach to balance covariates whose distribution is expected to differ if the values are not missing completely at random. After balancing, discrepancy statistics can be…
The Stochastic Block Model (SBM) is a popular probabilistic model for random graphs. It is commonly used for clustering network data by aggregating nodes that share similar connectivity patterns into blocks. When fitting an SBM to a network which is partially observed, it is important to take into account the underlying process that generates the missing values, otherwise the inference may be biased. This paper introduces missSBM, an R-package fitting the SBM when the network is partially observed, i.e., the adjacency matrix contains not only 1's or 0's encoding presence or absence of edges bu…
Return-to-baseline is an important method to impute missing values or unobserved potential outcomes when certain hypothetical strategies are used to handle intercurrent events in clinical trials. Current return-to-baseline approaches seen in literature and in practice inflate the variability of the "complete" dataset after imputation and lead to biased mean estimators {when the probability of missingness depends on the observed baseline and/or postbaseline intermediate outcomes}. In this article, we first provide a set of criteria a return-to-baseline imputation method should satisfy. Under th…
Discrete-time hidden Markov models (HMMs) have become an immensely popular tool for inferring latent animal behaviors from telemetry data. Here we introduce an open-source R package, momentuHMM, that addresses many of the deficiencies in existing HMM software. Features include: 1) data pre-processing and visualization; 2) user-specified probability distributions for an unlimited number of data streams and latent behavior states; 3) biased and correlated random walk movement models, including "activity centers" associated with attractive or repulsive forces; 4) user-specified design matrices an…
In clinical trials, mixed effects models for repeated measures (MMRM) and pattern mixture models (PMM) are often used to analyze longitudinal continuous outcomes. We describe a simple missing data imputation algorithm for the MMRM that can be easily implemented in standard statistical software packages such as SAS PROC MI. We explore the relationship of the missing data distribution in the control-based and delta-adjusted PMMs with that in the MMRM, and suggest an efficient imputation algorithm for these PMMs. The unobserved values in PMMs can be imputed by subtracting the mean difference in t…
We present single imputation method for missing values which borrows the idea of data depth---a measure of centrality defined for an arbitrary point of a space with respect to a probability distribution or data cloud. This consists in iterative maximization of the depth of each observation with missing values, and can be employed with any properly defined statistical depth function. For each single iteration, imputation reverts to optimization of quadratic, linear, or quasiconcave functions that are solved analytically by linear programming or the Nelder-Mead method. As it accounts for the und…
Missing data occur in many types of studies and typically complicate the analysis. Multiple imputation, either using joint modelling or the more flexible fully conditional specification approach, are popular and work well in standard settings. In settings involving non-linear associations or interactions, however, incompatibility of the imputation model with the analysis model is an issue often resulting in bias. Similarly, complex outcomes such as longitudinal or survival outcomes cannot be adequately handled by standard implementations. In this paper, we introduce the R package JointAI, whic…
missForestPredict -- Missing data imputation for prediction settings
KU Leuven（KU Leuven（荷语天主教鲁汶大学））；Leuven Unit for Health Technology Assessment Research (LUHTAR)（鲁汶卫生技术评估研究单元（LUHTAR））；School for Public Health and Primary Care, Maastricht University（马斯特里赫特大学公共卫生与基层保健学院）；Leiden University Medical Center（莱顿大学医学中心）
Balancing the distributions of the confounders across the exposure levels in an observational study through matching or weighting is an accepted method to control for confounding due to these variables when estimating the association between an exposure and outcome and to reduce the degree of dependence on certain modeling assumptions. Despite the increasing popularity in practice, these procedures cannot be immediately applied to datasets with missing values. Multiple imputation of the missing data is a popular approach to account for missing values while preserving the number of units in the…
Missingness in categorical data is a common problem in various real applications. Traditional approaches either utilize only the complete observations or impute the missing data by some ad hoc methods rather than the true conditional distribution of the missing data, thus losing or distorting the rich information in the partial observations. In this paper, we propose the Dirichlet Process Mixture of Collapsed Product-Multinomials (DPMCPM) to model the full data jointly and compute the model efficiently. By fitting an infinite mixture of product-multinomial distributions, DPMCPM is applicable f…
Missing data are common in data analyses in biomedical fields, and imputation methods based on random forests (RF) have become widely accepted, as the RF algorithm can achieve high accuracy without the need for specification of data distributions or relationships. However, the predictions from RF do not contain information about prediction uncertainty, which was unacceptable for multiple imputation. Available RF-based multiple imputation methods tried to do proper multiple imputation either by sampling directly from observations under predicting nodes without accounting for the prediction erro…
Imputing missing values is common practice in label-free quantitative proteomics. Imputation aims at replacing a missing value with a user-defined one. However, the imputation itself may not be optimally considered downstream of the imputation process, as imputed datasets are often considered as if they had always been complete. Hence, the uncertainty due to the imputation is not adequately taken into account. We provide a rigorous multiple imputation strategy, leading to a less biased estimation of the parameters' variability thanks to Rubin's rules. The imputation-based peptide's intensities…
In-Context Learning for the Imputation of Public Opinion Data with Large Language Models
LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学）；Munich Center for Machine Learning（慕尼黑机器学习中心）；University of Mannheim（曼海姆大学）；Institute for Employment Research (IAB)（就业研究所（IAB））；University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）
Recent advances in computational methods for intractable models have made network data increasingly amenable to statistical analysis. Exponential random graph models (ERGMs) emerged as one of the main families of models capable of capturing the complex dependence structure of network data in a wide range of applied contexts. The Bergm package for R has become a popular package to carry out Bayesian parameter inference, missing data imputation, model selection and goodness-of-fit diagnostics for ERGMs. Over the last few years, the package has been considerably improved in terms of efficiency by…
Penalized regression methods, such as lasso and elastic net, are used in many biomedical applications when simultaneous regression coefficient estimation and variable selection is desired. However, missing data complicates the implementation of these methods, particularly when missingness is handled using multiple imputation. Applying a variable selection algorithm on each imputed dataset will likely lead to different sets of selected predictors, making it difficult to ascertain a final active set without resorting to ad hoc combination rules. In this paper we consider a general class of penal…
Astronomical data often suffer from noise and incompleteness. We extend the common mixtures-of-Gaussians density estimation approach to account for situations with a known sample incompleteness by simultaneous imputation from the current model. The method, called GMMis, generalizes existing Expectation-Maximization techniques for truncated data to arbitrary truncation geometries and probabilistic rejection processes, as long as they can be specified and do not depend on the density itself. The method accounts for independent multivariate normal measurement errors for each of the observed sampl…
Estimation and Inference of the Win Ratio for Two Hierarchical Endpoints Subject to Censoring and Missing Data
Duke Clinical Research Institute（杜克临床研究所）；Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Duke University（杜克大学生物统计与生物信息学系）；Department of Statistics, North Carolina State University（北卡罗来纳州立大学统计学系）
A new method for clustered survival data]{A new method for clustered survival data: Estimation of treatment effect heterogeneity and variable selection
