EcoSta 2018: Registration
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A0359
Title: Using missing types to improve partial identification with application to a study of HIV prevalence in Malawi Authors:  Zhichao Jiang - Princeton University (United States) [presenting]
Abstract: Traditional missing data analysis uses only the information of the binary missing data indicator, that is, a certain data point is either missing or not. Nevertheless, real data often provide more information than a binary missing data indicator, and they often record different types of missingness. In a motivating HIV status survey, missing data may be due to the units unwillingness to respond to the survey items or their hospitalization during the visit, and may also be due to the units temporarily absence or relocation. It is apparent that some missing types are more likely to be missing not at random, but other missing types are more likely to be missing at random. We show that making full use of the missing types results in narrower bounds of the parameters of interest. In a real life example, we demonstrate substantial improvement of more than 50\% reduction in bound widths for estimating the prevalence of HIV in rural Malawi. As we illustrate using the HIV study, our strategy is also useful for conducting sensitivity analysis by gradually increasing or decreasing the set of types that are missing at random. In addition, we propose a method to construct confidence intervals for partially identified parameters with bounds expressed as the minimums and maximums of finite parameters, which is useful for not only our problem but also many other problems involving bounds.