Good  afternoon.

I'm running what I thought was a straightforward imputation problem in SAS
PROC MI.  The dataset includes age, sex, and dichotomous race (none
missing), 6 predictors with some missing (4 dichotomies, not grossly
unbalanced, two reasonably distributed continua), unemployment at 6 waves
(dichotomies, some missing), and occupational prestige at 6 waves
(continuous, well-distributed, missing wherever unemployment is a yes).

Everything looks fine except the plots for the occupational prestige
variables -- all the plots for the dichotomies look good.  This is with a
large number of burn-in iterations (10000) and iterations between
imputations (5000).

I'm sure most people here know more about what I'm doing than I do, so I'd
appreciate any advice.

Thanks,
Pat Malone

-- 
Patrick S. Malone, Ph.D., Research Scientist
Duke University Center for Child and Family Policy
http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/PublicPolicy/faculty/malone
http://childandfamilypolicy.duke.edu/
Yahoo Messenger: patricksmalone AOL Instant Messenger: pat2048
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From N.Smits <@t> psy.vu.nl  Fri Oct  6 10:33:00 2006
From: N.Smits <@t> psy.vu.nl (Niels Smits)
Date: Fri Oct  6 10:33:17 2006
Subject: [Impute] Bad ACF and time series plots
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <[email protected]>

Hi,

I think the problem is that your unemployment variable is in the 
imputation model. It is in fact a missing data indicator of occupational 
prestige. The unemployment variables add no new information to your data 
because whenever it has value 1,  some variables are missing. Moreover 
it messes up the estimation procedure. Removing them would solve the 
problem.

In general if all the `right' variables are in the imputation model , if 
there are still convergence problems try setting a hyperparameter (e.g., 
schafer [1997] p. 156)), which will smooth the covariance matrix and 
speed up the algorithm.

Cheers

Niels

Niels Smits
Research Methodology, 
Statistics and Data-analysis
Faculty of Psychology and Education
Free University Amsterdam
Van der Boechorststraat 1
1081 BT Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Tel:   +31 (0)20 5988713
Secr:  +31 (0)20 5988757
Fax:   +31 (0)20 5988758 




Patrick Malone wrote:

> Good  afternoon.
>
> I'm running what I thought was a straightforward imputation problem in 
> SAS PROC MI.  The dataset includes age, sex, and dichotomous race 
> (none missing), 6 predictors with some missing (4 dichotomies, not 
> grossly unbalanced, two reasonably distributed continua), unemployment 
> at 6 waves (dichotomies, some missing), and occupational prestige at 6 
> waves (continuous, well-distributed, missing wherever unemployment is 
> a yes).
>
> Everything looks fine except the plots for the occupational prestige 
> variables -- all the plots for the dichotomies look good.  This is 
> with a large number of burn-in iterations (10000) and iterations 
> between imputations (5000).
>
> I'm sure most people here know more about what I'm doing than I do, so 
> I'd appreciate any advice.
>
> Thanks,
> Pat Malone
>
> -- 
> Patrick S. Malone, Ph.D., Research Scientist
> Duke University Center for Child and Family Policy
> http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/PublicPolicy/faculty/malone
> http://childandfamilypolicy.duke.edu/
> Yahoo Messenger: patricksmalone AOL Instant Messenger: pat2048
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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