Correcting Conditional Mean Imputation for Censored Covariates and Improving Usability

TL;DR

This paper identifies and corrects errors in existing methods for imputing censored covariates, demonstrating the impact on statistical inference and providing a practical R package for improved analysis.

Contribution

It derives the correct formula for conditional mean imputation of censored covariates and shows how previous formulas lead to bias, offering a new software tool for researchers.

Findings

Incorrect formulas cause bias in parameter estimates.

Corrected formula improves imputation accuracy.

Software package facilitates implementation of the new method.

Abstract

Analysts are often confronted with censoring, wherein some variables are not observed at their true value, but rather at a value that is known to fall above or below that truth. While much attention has been given to the analysis of censored outcomes, contemporary focus has shifted to censored covariates, as well. Missing data is often overcome using multiple imputation, which leverages the entire dataset by replacing missing values with informed placeholders, and this method can be modified for censored data by also incorporating partial information from censored values. One such modification involves replacing censored covariates with their conditional means given other fully observed information, such as the censored value or additional covariates. So-called conditional mean imputation approaches were proposed for censored covariates in Atem et al. [2017], Atem et al.[2019a], and Atem et al. [2019b]. These methods are robust to additional parametric assumptions on the censored covariate and utilize all available data, which is appealing. As we worked to implement these methods, however, we discovered that these three manuscripts provide nonequivalent formulas and, in fact, none is the correct formula for the conditional mean. Herein, we derive the correct form of the conditional mean and demonstrate the impact of the incorrect formulas on the imputed values and statistical inference. Under several settings considered, using an incorrect formula is seen to seriously bias parameter estimation in simple linear regression. Lastly, we provide user-friendly R software, the imputeCensoRd package, to enable future researchers to tackle censored covariates in their data.