Statistics Colloquium: Jerry Reiter (Duke University)

Title:

How Auxiliary Information Can Help Your Missing Data Problem

Abstract:

Many surveys (and other types of databases) suffer from unit and item nonresponse. Typical practice accounts for unit nonresponse by inflating respondents’ survey weights, and accounts for item nonresponse using some form of imputation. Most methods implicitly treat both sources of nonresponse as missing at random. Sometimes, however, one knows information about the marginal distributions of some of the variables subject to missingness. In this talk, I discuss how such information can be leveraged to handle nonignorable missing data, including allowing different mechanisms for unit and item nonresponse (e.g., nonignorable unit nonresponse and ignorable item nonresponse).