Re: st: RE: St: Panel data imputation

[David Bai <db555@mail.com>]

Thank you, Nick and Maarten, for the very detailed response. Very 
helpful. Given the limitations of this command, it looks like that 
multiple imputation would be the best approach to dealing with the 
missing values. Am I understanding it correctly?

-----Original Message-----
From: Nick Cox <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk>
To: 'statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu' <statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu>
Sent: Tue, Sep 21, 2010 6:53 am
Subject: st: RE: St: Panel data imputation


The straight answer to this question is that -- as the help for 
-ipolate- makes
clear -- there is an -epolate- option which you can use at your peril 
to fill in
values at the ends of your series. This will work with panel data too, 
in the
sense that you will get what you ask for.

Note that -ipolate- is a command, not a function.

On the larger issue, raised by Maarten Buis, I hope we could all agree 
that
interpolation, which has a centuries-old history, is not quite a kind 
of
imputation, which is currently so fashionable as a species of 
statistical white
magic. (Naturally, your definition of imputation might be so wide that
interpolation is a special case; I would want to suggest that such a 
wide
definition will only lead to misunderstanding.)

I can see various advantages and disadvantages:

1. Interpolation is usually relatively simple to define. The linear
interpolation offered by -ipolate- certainly qualifies.

2. Interpolation is in various senses unstatistical, as

a. it takes account of at most local structure and works with data one 
response
variable at a time.

b. it typically reduces variability, which distorts statistical 
analysis to an
unknown extent

c. it is deterministic so is not accompanied by any estimate of error.

Clearly, this isn't a complete characterisation. Also it simplifies 
some larger
issues.

I am at an extreme position within this list, as I have never used 
imputation,
but I have often used interpolation for gappy time series or spatial 
series with
no covariates. Such work has had as side-effects programs -cipolate- 
and
-csipolate- on SSC.

If you are using interpolation I have some hackneyed pieces of advice:

* Get a feeling of how interpolation treats data like yours by 
artificially
introducing gaps in good quality data and seeing how successful 
interpolation is
at reproducing known values.

* Try different kinds of interpolation to get a sense of how far they 
agree.
* Go very easy on the extrapolation.

This commentary steals one cogent remark made by Patrick Royston in a
conversation at the recent London users' meeting.

Nick
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk

Maarten Buis
============

-ipolate- is generally not a good imputation method. Look at -help mi- 
and
-findit ice- instead.

David Bai
=========

I have a panel data (year and revenue) and would like to use
ipolate function to impute the missing values for some years. What kind
of data will not be imputed if I use this method? It looks like that,
when I have missing values for the beginning year or the end of the
year, this method will not impute the missing values in these years. Is
there a way to deal with this problem?


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