读文献《Multiple Imputation for Incomplete Data in Epidemiologic Studies》

Harel, O., Mitchell, E. M., Perkins, N. J., Cole, S. R., Tchetgen Tchetgen, E. J., & Sun, B., et al. (2018). Multiple imputation for incomplete data in epidemiologic studies. American Journal of Epidemiology.

摘要：Epidemiologic studies are frequently susceptible to missing information. Omitting observations with missing variables
remains a common strategy in epidemiologic studies, yet this simple approach can often severely bias
parameter estimates of interest if the values are not missing completely at random. Even when missingness is
completely random, complete-case analysis can reduce the efficiency of estimated parameters, because large
amounts of available data are simply tossed out with the incomplete observations. Alternative methods for mitigating
the influence of missing information, such as multiple imputation, are becoming an increasing popular strategy
in order to retain all available information, reduce potential bias, and improve efficiency in parameter estimation. In
this paper, we describe the theoretical underpinnings of multiple imputation, and we illustrate application of this
method as part of a collaborative challenge to assess the performance of various techniques for dealing with missing
data (Am J Epidemiol. 2018;187(3):568–575 ). We detail the steps necessary to perform multiple imputation on
a subset of data from the Collaborative Perinatal Project (1959–1974), where the goal is to estimate the odds of
spontaneous abortion associated with smoking during pregnancy.