Fractional hot deck imputation

To compensate for item nonresponse, hot deck imputation procedures replace missing values with values that occur in the sample. Fractional hot deck imputation replaces each missing observation with a set of imputed values and assigns a weight to each imputed value. Under the model in which observations in an imputation cell are independently and identically distributed, fractional hot deck imputation is shown to be an effective imputation procedure. A consistent replication variance estimation procedure for estimators computed with fractional imputation is suggested. Simulations show that fractional imputation and the suggested variance estimator are superior to multiple imputation estimators in general, and much superior to multiple imputation for estimating the variance of a domain mean. Copyright Biometrika Trust 2004, Oxford University Press.