Imputation in R

Question

I am new in R programming language. I just wanted to know is there any way to impute null values of just one column in our dataset. Because all of imputation co

Answer 1

Why not use more sophisticated imputation algorithms, such as mice (Multiple Imputation by Chained Equations)? Below is a code snippet in R you can adapt to your case.

library(mice)

#get the nhanes dataset
dat <- mice::nhanes

#impute it with mice
imp <- mice(mice::nhanes, m = 3, print=F)

imputed_dataset_1<-complete(imp,1)

head(imputed_dataset_1)

#     age  bmi hyp chl
# 1   1   22.5   1 118
# 2   2   22.7   1 187
# 3   1   30.1   1 187
# 4   3   24.9   1 186
# 5   1   20.4   1 113
# 6   3   20.4   1 184

#Now, let's see what methods have been used to impute each column
meth<-imp$method
#  age   bmi   hyp   chl
#"" "pmm" "pmm" "pmm"

#The age column is complete, so, it won't be imputed
# Columns bmi, hyp and chl are going to be imputed with pmm (predictive mean matching)

#Let's say that we want to impute only the "hyp" column
#So, we set the methods for the bmi and chl column to ""
meth[c(2,4)]<-""
#age   bmi   hyp   chl 
#""    "" "pmm"    "" 

#Let's run the mice imputation again, this time setting the methods parameter to our modified method
imp <- mice(mice::nhanes, m = 3, print=F, method = meth)

partly_imputed_dataset_1 <- complete(imp, 3)

head(partly_imputed_dataset_1)

#    age  bmi hyp chl
# 1   1   NA   1  NA
# 2   2 22.7   1 187
# 3   1   NA   1 187
# 4   3   NA   2  NA
# 5   1 20.4   1 113
# 6   3   NA   2 184