 
Hi list,

I am wondering if there is a way to use EM algorithm to handle missing data and get a completed data set in R? 

I usually do it in SPSS because EM in SPSS kind of "fill in" the estimated value for the missing data, and then the completed dataset can be saved and used for further analysis. But I have not found a way to get the a completed data set like this in R or SAS. With Amelia or MICE, the missing data set were imputed a couple of times, and the new imputed datasets were not combined. I understand that the parameter estimation can still be done in the way of combination of estimates from each imputed data set, but it would be more convenient to have a combined dataset to do some analysis, for example, ANOVA with IVs having more than two categories. In this case, the only way to get the main effect of the whole IV is to estimate parameters in a single data set(as far as I know). If the separated imputed data sets were used, then the main effect showed in the result were for each category of the IV, respectively. I figured sometimes the readers and reviewers would like to see how big the effect for the whole IV instead of the effect of each category of that IV.

This is one of the reasons I can not fully move to R from SPSS. So any suggestions?

Thank you very much.




ya
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