Re: st: details of how the impute command work

[Richard Williams <Richard.A.Williams.5@ND.edu>]

At 04:04 PM 11/6/2007, Tim Hale wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have a rather simple question. I am trying to figure out exactly
> what the -impute- command in Stata does to estimate missing values.
> The help files in Stata are not very helpful. From what I have found
> on the internet, it appears -impute- is a regression-based method to
> estimate missing values based on other variables in the data set.
> However, the help files also say that -impute- "organizes the cases by
> patterns of missing data so that the missing-value regressions can be
> conducted efficiently." Does anyone know what this entails? I need to
> include some mention of this in my methods section.
I think that is just a technical detail about how it does its work 
and is probably not too important for your purposes.  -impute- is 
generally not considered the best way in the world to do things; but 
if you want to see a discussion of it, look at pp. 10-13 of the following:

http://www.nd.edu/~rwilliam/xsoc63993/l12.pdf

Also see the middle of p. 5 for a brief discussion of why -impute- is 
looked down on by many.


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Richard Williams, Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
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