Dear Bret and Maarten,
Indeed, it looks like both -hotdeck- and -ice- don't have the format-type problem that I highlighted with regard to -impute-. At the same time, substance-related merits and demerits of the three commands aside, it would have been nice to know if indeed I was right that -impute- doesn't allow creating the imputed variables in 'double' instead of 'float'.
So far apparently no "defender" of -impute- stood up to comment on this--I would still appreciate any remarks on this issue if anyone can confirm or otherwise correct my finding with regard to format type of -impute-, which apparently to-date is the only of the 3 that is an official stata command for imputing missing values.
Just a brief aside: Looks like hotdeck is doing a few strange things given the way the programme was coded. E.g. it generates the new stata dataset as "filename.dta1" instead of "filename.dta". To see this concretely, do this:
.. webuse abdata
.. hotdeck nL1 w k using my_imputed.dta, store
DELETING all matrices....
Table of the Missing data patterns
* signifies missing and - is not missing
Varlist order: nL1 w k
pattern | Freq. Percent Cum.
------------+-----------------------------------
*-- | 140 13.58 13.58
--- | 891 86.42 100.00
------------+-----------------------------------
Total | 1,031 100.00
1031
WARNING: When the <command> option is not selected
then no analysis is performed on the imputed datasets
.. use my_imputed.dta, clear
file my_imputed.dta not found
r(601);
.. use my_imputed.dta1, clear
.. d
Contains data from my_imputed.dta1
obs: 1,031
vars: 3 15 Jul 2008 19:10
size: 16,496 (99.8% of memory free)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------- storage display value
variable name type format label variable label
---------------------------------------------------------------------------w float %9.0g
k float %9.0g
nL1 float %9.0g
---------------------------------------------------------------------------Sorted by:
..
Regards,
Hewan
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