topic Re: Imputation for categorical variables in SAS Data Science

Imputation for categorical variables

frupaul — Mon, 19 Jun 2017 12:00:17 GMT

Hello Everyone,

I was just wondering what the best imputation method for categorical variables is. Considering many categorical variables (with exception of variables such as postcodes etc) dont have too many levels, will it not be misleading to impute their missing values?

I have always thought creating a 'one-size-fits-all' variable such as CCC and imputing that for every missing level might be more reasonable. Can someone help out with any ideas or suggestions?

Thanks

Re: Imputation for categorical variables

PaigeMiller — Mon, 19 Jun 2017 12:21:55 GMT

There's lots of discussion of this subject if you go to your favorite search engine and type in

imputing categorical variables

Re: Imputation for categorical variables

Reeza — Mon, 19 Jun 2017 14:11:22 GMT

That's why you do multiple imputation to reduce chance of bias AND to understand the effect of the imputation.

This isn't a SAS question though, it's a statistics question better answered by statisticians or Google.