Anomaly when imputing a Normal response

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MannyGomez
Posts: 17
Joined: Mon Feb 17, 2014 4:55 pm

Anomaly when imputing a Normal response

Post by MannyGomez »

Hi,
I'm faced with an unusual situation. I have used Realcom to impute one (hierarchical) Normally distributed variable (mean 200, 95%CI: 25 to 650, and no negative values). After imputation, I checked the imputed values and found that a substantial number of them were negative and very far from zero, such as -3000 or -2000 (!). Since the variable was approx Normal and sample size>5000, I found this very strange. I computed multilevel MICE in R (using the same imputation model), and the imputed values were well within the range of the observed values.

Potential candidates that may have caused the problem in Realcom:

1- I have only 5 clusters (level-2 identifier). Although this did not cause any problem for multilevel MICE.
2- The variables included in the model do not explain much of the missingness. In other words, is Realcom more sensitive to misspecification than multivel MICE?
3- Any computational issue? I have considered burnin=1000, no. of imputations=50, MCMC iterations=10,000.

Which of these may have caused the problem? Any other suspicion?

Many thanks, Manny
ChrisCharlton
Posts: 1351
Joined: Mon Oct 19, 2009 10:34 am

Re: Anomaly when imputing a Normal response

Post by ChrisCharlton »

That does look odd. Would it be possible to send either myself or Harvey Goldstein (email address here: http://www.bris.ac.uk/cmm/team/) an example dataset where this occurs so that we can investigate further?
MannyGomez
Posts: 17
Joined: Mon Feb 17, 2014 4:55 pm

Re: Anomaly when imputing a Normal response

Post by MannyGomez »

Okay, will do.
When possible, could I have your views on the other issue I raised in the MLwiN user forum on the mixture distribution?
Cheers,
Manny
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