miceExt: Extension Package to mice
This package extends and builds on the mice package by adding a functionality to perform multivariate predictive mean matching on imputed data as well as new functionalities to perform predictive mean matching on factor variables.
Installation
The miceExt
package can be installed from CRAN as follows:install.packages("miceExt")
Overview
Overall, miceExt provides three funtions, namely
mice.post.matching()
,mice.binarize()
,mice.factorize()
,
out of which the first function post-processes results of the mice()-algorithm by performing
multivariate predictive mean matching on a user-defined set of column tuples, and results in
imputations that are always equal to already-observed values, which annihilates the chance of
getting unrealistic output values.
The latter two functions provide a new option to impute categorical data by even extending the
functionality of mice.post.matching()
. The function mice.binarize()
transforms categorical
attributes of a given data frame into a binary dummy representation, which results in an
exclusively numerical data set that mice can handle well. Inconsistencies within the imputed
dummy columns can then be handled by mice.post.matching()
, and mice.factorize()
finally
serves the purpose of retransforming the imputed binary data into the corresponding original
categories, resulting in a proper imputation of the given categorical data.
Examples
1 Post-processing of imputated data by multivariate PMM
In this example, we work on a modification of the mammalsleep
data set from mice, mammal_data
,
which is included in the miceExt-package and which has identical missing data patterns on the column
tuples (ps
,sws
) and (mls
,gt
). We want to post-process the imputations gained from after running
mice()
on this data by performing multivariate PMM on these tuples. This procedure works in two simple
steps:
Run
mice()
on data setmammal_data
and obtain a mids object to post-process:mids_mammal <- mice(mammal_data)
Run
mice.post.matching()
. As column argumentblocks
has not been specified, it will automatically detect the column tuples with identical missing data patterns and then impute on these:post_mammal <- mice.post.matching(mids_mammal)
Now we can look into the resulting imputations via post_mammal$midsobj$imp
or analyze the results via
the with()
function.
2 Imputation of categorical data
In this example, we want to impute the categorical columns gen
and phb
in the data set boys
that is
included in the mice-package with the functionalities of the package. This works in three main steps:
Binarize the factor columns in boys the we want to impute on. By default,
mice.binarize()
will automatically identify all factor columns with missing values and binarize them.boys_bin <- mice.binarize(boys)
Run
mice()
on binarized data and post-process the result withmice.post.matching()
, as it is very likely thatmice()
imputed multiple ones among one set of dummy variables:# run mice, note that we need to grab `boys_bin$data` and also use `boys_bin$pred_matrix` as predictor matrix for mice() # to obtain cleaner models mids_boys <- mice(boys_bin$data, predictorMatrix = boys_bin$pred_matrix) # post_process with mice.post.matching, use output weights from mice.binarize() to avoid imbalanced imputations post_boys <- mice.post.matching(mids_boys, weights = boys_bin$weights)
Retransform the resulting imputations back into categorical format:
res_boys <- mice.factorize(post_boys$midsobj, boys_bin$par_list)
Also in this case, we can analyze the resulting imputed dataset via the with()
function. If, e.g., we want to take
a closer look at the distribution of the values of gen
, we can use:with(res_boys, table(gen))