Multiple Imputation of Missing Values

Following the seminal publications of Rubin about thirty years ago, statisticians have become increasingly aware of the inadequacy of “complete-case” analysis of datasets with missing observations. In medicine, for example, observations may be missing in a sporadic way for different covariates, and a complete-case analysis may omit as many as half of the available cases. Hotdeck imputation was implemented in Stata in 1999 by Mander and Clayton. However, this technique may perform poorly when many rows of data have at least one missing value. This article describes an implementation for Stata of the MICE method of multiple multivariate imputation described by van Buuren, Boshuizen, and Knook (1999). MICE stands…