A personal view of hot deck imputation procedures - ARCHIVED

Articles and reports: 12-001-X197900254832

Description:

A Hot Deck imputation procedure is defined to be one where an incomplete response is completed by using values from one or more other records on the same file and the choice of these records varies with the record requiring imputation.

General approaches to Hot Deck imputation are outlined, with emphasis on the interaction between the edit constraints and the imputation procedures. Distance functions can be constructed on a mixture of categorical and numeric fields, can be modified to take account of the relative importance of fields and can discriminate against less desirable donors. Matching fields may be correlated with missing fields, may be linked with missing fields by edits or may be natural stratification variables; but increasing the number of matching fields does not necessarily result in a better match. It is important to audit the imputation process and to summarize its performance.

Hot Deck procedures should be evaluated to study the bias and reliability of the estimates, donor usage and frequency of imputation failure in terms of a variety of conditions of the data and variations of the imputation procedure. It appears that the only generally available approach to evaluation is by simulation.

Issue Number: 1979002
Author(s): Sande, Innis G.

Main Product: Survey Methodology

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PDFDecember 14, 1979

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