# hmi: hierarchical multiple imputation

## Purpose of package

The hmi package allows the user to run single level and multilevel imputation models. The big additional benefit of this package is the user-friendliness. It is designed for researchers, experienced in running single and multilevel analysis models, but not in writing own multilevel imputation routines.

The user just has to pass the data to the main function and, optionally, his analysis model. Basically the package then translates this analysis model into commands to impute the data according to it with functions from mice, MCMCglmm or routines build for this package.

## Basic functionality

The main function that wraps up all sub functions is hmi.

In the most simple case, the user just passes his data to hmi. In this case all variables with missing values are imputed based on a single level imputation model including the other variables. The situation, for which the package was built for, is that the user additionally passes his analysis model as model_formula to hmi (and defines more details if he wants to). The function then analyzes the model_formula, checks whether it suits to the data given and runs some other checks on the data given (size of the data, number of remaining observations etc.).

### Output of hmi

The package is build to be compatible with mice; especially with regard the output. hmi returns, like mice, a so-called mids-object (multiply imputed data set).

This allows the user, familiar with mice to use functions designed for mice-outputs without switching barriers. For example, running the generic plot()-function on a mids-object calls the function plot.mids showing the means and variances of the imputed variables over the different imputations, regardless whether the mids-object came from mice or hmi. Or he could call the complete-function delivered by mice to get a completed data set where the NAs are replaced by the imputed values.

## The different types of imputation routines / the supported types of variables

Different variable types require different imputation routines. For example for binary variables it would be unpleasant to impute other values than 0 and 1. And factor variables with levels "A", "B" and "C" need an imputation routine different to the ones for binary and continuous variables.

To determine which imputation routine shall be used, we first have to decide whether a single level or multilevel model shall be used. This decision is mainly based on the model_formula given by the user. The formula is decomposed into its fixed effects, random effects and cluster variable parts (if present). If the cluster variable and the random effect variables are actually present in the data set and available in the moment of imputation, a multilevel model is run. In all other cases (i.e. not available or not specified) a single level model is run.

The second question is which type the variable is of. We distinguish eight different types of variable. The next sections describe how we assign a type to a variable and how the imputation model works for these types. For some special cases the rules of assignment might give unwanted results. Therefore the user can specify the types of the variables in advance by setting up a list_of_types. Section Pre-definition of the variable types explains how this is done.

MCMCglmm assumes for each type of variable, that there is a latent variable $$l$$ present which can be expressed by fix and random effects. So $$l = X \cdot \beta + Z \cdot u + \varepsilon$$ (cf. Hadfield 2010 eq. 3). The probability of observing $$y_i$$ is conditioned on $$l_i$$: $$f_i(y_i|l_i)$$, with $$f_i$$ being the probability density function (pdf) for $$y_i$$. More about the theory behind MCMCglmm can be found in the below.

For completeness: each imputation routine starts with some cleanup. This includes for example removing linear dependent variables (or other variables likely to hamper the imputation model like factors with more then 10 levels) from the current imputation.

### Binary variables (keyword "binary")

Data are considered to be binary if there are only two unique values. This includes for example 0 and 1 or "m" and "f".

The single level imputation model is a logistic regression for a binomial family with a logit link. Based on this model new (Bayesian) imputation parameters are drawn. Those parameters are then used to sample binary observations, given the other covariates. This is implemented in the mice.impute.logreg-function which is called when running mice with the method = "logreg".

In the multilevel model MCMCglmm is called with family = categorical. This uses the pdf $$\exp(l)/(1+\exp(l))$$

Settings where our rule of classification might fail are small data, or data with very few observed individuals or if a third possible category is unobserved. E.g. in a small health survey it could happen that none of the respondents reported having had two (or more) Bypass operations. So here a count variable would falsely be classified as binary.

### continuous variables (keyword "cont")

Any numeric vector, that isn’t one of the other types, is considered to be continuous.

In the single level model, mice.impute.norm from mice is called. This routine first draws imputation parameters (regression coefficients and residual variance) and then draws imputation values with these parameters.

In the multilevel model MCMCglmm is called with family = categorical. This uses the normal distribution.

### semicontinuous variables (keyword "semicont")

A continuous variable with more than 5% values being 0, is defined being “semicontinuous”.

The first step of imputing semicontinuous variables is to temporarily change internally all non-zero values to 1. Then via a binary imputation (based on the temporarily 0/1 variable) it is decided for the missing values whether they shall be 0 or non-zero.

In a third step, for those being chosen to be non-zero, we run a continuous imputation model based on the originally non-zero observations. (Missing values, chosen to be 0, don’t need further treatment, their imputation values is just 0).

### rounded continuous variables (keyword "roundedcont")

If more than 50% of the data are divisible by 5, they are considered to be “rounded continuous”. For example the income in surveys is often reported rounded by the respondents.

For this type of variable, we use our own imputation routine.

It estimates a model for the rounding degree G and for the variable Y itself, then parameters for the joint distribution of G and Y are drawn and afterward used to impute values. Not only missing values get a new imputed value, but also values with an interval response (e.g. “between 1500 and 2000”) and (presumably) rounded responses.

Individuals with NAs get imputed values drawn from the normal distribution with the estimated parameters from the joint distribution. Interval responses get imputed values drawn from the truncated normal distribution. For individuals with (presumably) rounded responses, values are drawn for G and Y and then checked whether this combination could explain the actual observed value of Y for this observation. E.g. if 2950 is observed then the combination (G = degree 100, Y = 3000) would not fit to the observed response. In the case of a mismatch, the process is repeated until G and Y match.

The process is described in detail in (Drechsler, Kiesl, and Speidel 2015).

### interval variables (keyword "interval")

We see interval data as a special case of imprecise observations given as a mathematical interval $$[l;~u]$$ with $$l \leq u$$. For example a person could refuse to report its precise income $$y$$, but is willing to report that it is something between 1500 and 2000. In this case the interval $$[1500; ~2000]$$ is the observed value for this individual. Precise answers like $$3217$$ can be seen as special cases of interval data where $$l=u$$, here $$[3217;~3217]$$. Missing values can be seen as the extreme case $$[-\infty;~\infty]$$.

To our knowledge, there is no standard in R for interval data. One possibility would be to generate two variables for the lower and the upper bounds of the data. Based on this approach (Wiencierz 2012) set up the idf-objects (interval data frame) in her package linLIR. We didn’t follow this approach for our package because it would need an inconvenient workflow to link both variables appropriately. Instead, we define a new class interval for interval variables. Interval variables actually come in one variable. Technically one observation in such an interval variable is "l;u" with l (resp. u) being a scalar with optional decimal places in American notation (with a full stop. E.g. "1234.56;3000") or -Inf (resp. Inf).

Within most R functions such an interval-variable will be treated as a factor. But it is a factor with maybe more than 100 categories. So we suggest not to use such a variable as covariate in a imputation model. Within hmi it would not be used as this would be too many categories. The main reason to use an interval variable is to impute this variable according to (Drechsler, Kiesl, and Speidel 2015).

We also implemented functions to run basic calculations on interval data (+, -, ’*’ and /), to generate interval data based on two vectors (as_interval) or to split interval data up into their lower and upper bounds (split_interval).

Furthermore, we want to encourage people working with interval data or variables and hope that a standard for this will emerge. For this reason we think, users should be able to switch easily between idf and interval objects as one might be better for one task and the other for a different task. So we implemented idf2interval and interval2idf which conveys an object from one format to the other (as far as possible).

### count variables (keyword "count")

Every vector with integers (which is not semicontinuous) is considered to be count data. By this definition, every continuous variable, rounded to the next integer is considered to be a count variable.

For both, single level and multilevel settings, we use MCMCglmm with the poisson distribution for the latent variable.

### categorical variables (keyword "categorical")

Factor-variables (or variables with more than two categories - if they are not one of the previous types) are considered to be categorical variables.

For the single level setting we use the cart approach in mice. This runs a regression tree for the observed data and then samples from suitable leaves for the individuals with missing values.

In the multi level setting, we use the categorical setting in MCMCglmm with runs a multilevel regression model for each category (based on the observed individuals). For the individuals with missing values, probabilities for each category are be calculated and than a category sampled based on these probabilities.

### ordered categorical variables (keyword "ordered_categorical")

In the special case, that a factor variable is ordered, we treat it as ordered categorical.

For the single level case mice is told to run an ordered logistic model. MCMCglmm for the multilevel setting runs the ordinal model.

The assumption behind both models is that a latent variable $$l$$ is assumed to be present and dependent on how many thresholds $$\gamma$$, the variable exceeded, a higher category $$k$$ is observed.

### Intercept variable (keyword "intercept")

A constant variable (only one kind of observation) is considered to be a intercept variable.

## pre-definition of the variable types

If you want to have manual control over the process which method is used for each variable, you can specify a list_of_types. This is a list where each list element has the name of a variable in the data frame. The elements have to contain a single character string denoting the type of the variable (the keywords from the previous section). With the function list_of_types_maker, the user can get the framework for this object.

In most scenarios this is shouldn’t be necessary. One example where it might be necessary is when only two observations of a continuous variable are left - because in this case get_type interpret this variable to be binary. Or if you want to impute rounded continuous variables not as "count", but as "cont".

The example uses the data set CO2 about the “Carbon Dioxide Uptake in Grass Plants”, which comes along with R. If you run the common str(CO2), you get the information that the variable Plant is an Ord.factor w/ 12 levels, Type is a Factor w/ 2 levels, Treatment is a Factor w/ 2 levels, conc is a num and so is uptake.

hmi draws similar conclusions. A difference would be that we call Factors with 2 levels “binary”. Also the variable conc would be considered to be a special case of a continuous variable - a rounded continuous because every value of the ambient carbon dioxide concentration is divisible by at least 5.

You can see in advance how variables will be treated internally by hmi if you call the list_of_types_maker. For example example_list_of_types <- list_of_types_maker(CO2) gives you the following list:

## $Plant ## [1] "ordered_categorical" ## ##$Type
## [1] "binary"
##
## $Treatment ## [1] "binary" ## ##$conc
## [1] "roundedcont"
##
## $uptake ## [1] "cont" Now you can modify example_list_of_types according to your preferences. For example if you want the variable conc to be continuous, you can write example_list_of_types[["conc"]] <- "cont". If you finished your modification on example_list_of_types, pass this list to hmi via its parameter list_of_types. In our example it would be hmi(data = CO2, list_of_types = example_list_of_types). (Note, that CO2 doesn’t contain any missing value, so there is no need for imputation.) ## how to use it To illustrate the use of hmi, we stick to the CO2 data set; but as it has no missing values, we add those artificially: library("lme4") ## Loading required package: Matrix ex <- sleepstudy set.seed(1) ex[sample(1:nrow(CO2), size = 20), "Reaction"] <- NA head(ex) # e.g. in line 5 there is a NA now. ## Reaction Days Subject ## 1 NA 0 308 ## 2 258.7047 1 308 ## 3 250.8006 2 308 ## 4 321.4398 3 308 ## 5 356.8519 4 308 ## 6 414.6901 5 308 A big part of the packages contribution is the multilevel imputation. For example, if your interest lies in modeling the effect of the carbon dioxide uptake rates (target variable uptake) by the ambient carbon dioxide concentration (explanatory variable conc) - and an intercept. Assuming that the effects of conc and the intercept on uptake can differ across the different plants (random effect variable Plant), your analysis model using lmer from the lme4 package would be lmer(uptake ~ 1 + conc + (1 + conc | Plant), data = example). Just for clarification how this model is read by hmi: the word left to ~ denotes the target variable, the parts right to ~ denote the fixed and random effects variables and the cluster ID. And in more detail, the parts within the parentheses left to | denote the random effects variables and the word right to | denotes the cluster ID: library("lme4") lmer(formula = Reaction~1+Days+(1+Days|Subject), data = ex, na.action = na.omit) ## Linear mixed model fit by REML ['lmerMod'] ## Formula: Reaction ~ 1 + Days + (1 + Days | Subject) ## Data: ex ## REML criterion at convergence: 1563.228 ## Random effects: ## Groups Name Std.Dev. Corr ## Subject (Intercept) 24.591 ## Days 5.892 0.07 ## Residual 26.595 ## Number of obs: 160, groups: Subject, 18 ## Fixed Effects: ## (Intercept) Days ## 252.03 10.51 If we would run hmi(ex) without further specification, we would end up in running a single level imputation. To make hmi run a multilevel imputation model, you have to specify a multilevel analysis model and this has two mandatory elements: 1. variables with a cluster specific effect (random effects variables) and 2. a variable indicating the clusters. By passing your analysis model formula to hmi you implicitly specify your imputation model(s). If there are more variables with missing values, then the other variables are tried to be imputed with a similar model. This means that maybe only one covariate in the analysis model becomes the target variable in the imputation model, but the random effects variables and the cluster ID keep the same (except in the case a random effects variable is to be imputed. In this case this variable is dropped from the random effects part of the imputation model). So here a multilevel imputation would be set up by (as we have only one variable to impute, we can set maxit to 1): ## Warning in checkConv(attr(opt, "derivs"), opt$par, ctrl = control$checkConv, : ## Model failed to converge with max|grad| = 0.00204228 (tol = 0.002, component 1) Now the imputation is complete and with the resulting mids-object you could do all the things described in the section above. Here we were especially interested in multilevel models, so we want to run our analysis model on the imputed data. By this it is meant that the model is run on every of the M completed data set and then the results are combined according to Rubin’s combining rules (Rubin 1987). mice has the functions fit and pool to do this. But only certain parameters of your model are pooled. result_multi$pooling
## Class: mipo    m = 5
##          term m  estimate      ubar         b         t dfcom        df
## 1 (Intercept) 5 251.48160 46.849318 5.3554726 53.275885   174  97.58036
## 2        Days 5  10.51484  2.542351 0.1694224  2.745658   174 130.74674
##          riv     lambda        fmi
## 1 0.13717525 0.12062807 0.13811403
## 2 0.07996804 0.07404667 0.08789304

# References

Drechsler, Jörg, Hans Kiesl, and Matthias Speidel. 2015. “MI Double Feature: Multiple Imputation to Address Nonresponse and Rounding Errors in Income Questions.” Austrian Journal of Statistics 44 (2). https://doi.org/10.17713/ajs.v44i2.77.

Hadfield, Jarrod D. 2010. “MCMC Methods for Multi-Response Generalized Linear Mixed Models: The MCMCglmm R Package.” Journal of Statistical Software 44 (2). https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v033.i02.

Rubin, Donald. 1987. Multiple Imputation for Nonresponse in Surveys. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470316696.

Wiencierz, Andrea. 2012. “linLIR: Linear Likelihood-Based Imprecise Regression.” https://cran.r-project.org/package=linLIR.