The Additive Model with Missing Values in the Independent Variable - Theory and Simulation

Abstract

After a short introduction of the model, the missing mechanism and the method of inference some imputation procedures are introduced with special focus on the simulation experiment. Within this experiment, the simple additive model y = f(x) + e is assumed to have missing values in the independent variable according to MCAR. Besides the well-known complete case analysis, mean imputation plus random noise, a single imputation and two ways of nearest neighbor imputation are used. These methods are compared within a simulation experiment based on the average mean square error, variances and biases of \hat{f}(x) at the knots.