Compensating for Missing Data from Longitudinal Studies Using WinBUGS

Missing data is a common problem in survey based research. There are many packages that compensate for missing data but few can easily compensate for missing longitudinal data. WinBUGS compensates for missing data using multiple imputation, and is able to incorporate longitudinal structure using ran...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gretchen Carrigan, Adrian G. Barnett, Annette J. Dobson, Gita Mishra
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Foundation for Open Access Statistics 2007-06-01
Series:Journal of Statistical Software
Subjects:
Online Access:http://www.jstatsoft.org/v19/i07/paper
Description
Summary:Missing data is a common problem in survey based research. There are many packages that compensate for missing data but few can easily compensate for missing longitudinal data. WinBUGS compensates for missing data using multiple imputation, and is able to incorporate longitudinal structure using random effects. We demonstrate the superiority of longitudinal imputation over cross-sectional imputation using WinBUGS. We use example data from the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health. We give a SAS macro that uses WinBUGS to analyze longitudinal models with missing covariate date, and demonstrate its use in a longitudinal study of terminal cancer patients and their carers.
ISSN:1548-7660