A Different Approach to the Problem of Missing Data

• Activity Number: 139
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 10, 2015 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Biometrics Section
• Author(s): Norman Matloff*
• Companies: UC Davis
• Keywords: missing data ; multiple imputation ; linear regression ; log-linear model

Abstract

There is a long history of devleopment of methodology dealing with missing data in statistical analysis. Today, the most popular methods fall into two classes, Complete Cases (CC) and Multiple Imputation (MI). Another approach, Available Cases (AC), has occasionally been mentioned in the research literature, in the context of linear regression analysis, but has generally been ignored. In this paper, we revisit the AC method, showing that it can perform better than CC and MI, and we extend its breadth of application.