st: why it worked so slowly to do multiple imputation on 204 ordinal variables

[Mandy fu <mandy.fu1@gmail.com>]

Dear all,

I met some difficulty to conduct multiple imputation for 204 ordinal
categorical variables. The computer worked unbelievably slowly. I
would really appreciate if someone could give me some
suggestion.

The data set I have includes :

 *450 observations totally
 *204 ordinal variables (after imputation these 204 items are used to
calculate 5 scales, which are the dependent variables in the
          following regressions)  have missing values
 *   4  independent variables (dummy variables)                 no
missing values at all

I used --ice-- and included all the 208 variables in the variable list
to be imputed using ologit. I set up imputing 5 times and 10 cycles
for regressions( m(5) cycle(10)).

The problem is, the computer works unbelievably slowly when conducting
the MI. It has taken two whole days until now and the computer is
still working on it now. I cannot figure out why this assignment
causes the computer worked so slowly. I don't think the computer has
problem, since I have tried on three computers at different locations
and all of them worked very slowly.

Thanks for your time!

Sincerely,
Mandy Fu
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