Please join us for the 2026 Robert Wherry Lecture with Dr. Sophia Rabe-Hesketh (UC Berkeley School of Education)!
Title: Simple solutions to missing data problems
Abstract: It is often believed that multiple imputation or analysis of all available data via maximum likelihood or Bayesian estimation are the best solutions to missing data problems. Such methods are usually accompanied by a generic missing at random (MAR) statement without elaboration. In this talk, I will show that deletion of some of the available data may be necessary to avoid bias, an extreme example being listwise deletion. A new contribution is that we can “make” the missingness process ignorable under certain MAR violations by deleting some values for some variables (Rabe-Hesketh & Skrondal, Psychometrika, 2023). This data-deletion approach has connections with ordered factorization (Mohan & Pearl, JASA, 2021). Simulations demonstrate that bias due to violations of MAR assumptions can be mitigated by data deletion and that conditional independence tests can guide the choice of approach. Furthermore, by inspecting missingness patterns in the data (and possibly changing them by deletion), we can replace the generic MAR statement by often much weaker explicit conditional independence assumptions.
About Dr. Rabe-Hesketh: Sophia Rabe-Hesketh is a distinguished professor at the Berkeley School of Education and the Graduate Group of Biostatistics at the University of California, Berkeley. She obtained her Ph.D. in theoretical physics at King’s College, London, followed by a postdoc in image analysis at the Department of Statistics, University of Leeds, and then a tenure track position at the Department of Biostatistics, Institute of Psychiatry, University of London. She has developed a modeling framework, GLLAMM, that unifies and extends a wide range of latent variable models, including structural equation models, multilevel/mixed models, and latent class models. Much of her research has been on different aspects of latent variable modeling, such as estimation, identification, and model evaluation. A more recent interest has been in missing data problems. Rabe-Hesketh has authored six books and over 130 peer-reviewed papers, and her h-index is 81 in Google Scholar. Her honors include being elected a member of the National Academy of Education, a fellow of the American Statistical Association, and a lifetime honorary member of the European Association of Methodology.
The annual Robert Wherry Speaker Series honors the memory of former department chair Robert J. Wherry, Sr., who was a prominent researcher and educator in industrial/organizational and quantitative psychology. These lectures focus on methodological issues in psychological research and are funded by the Robert Wherry Development Fund and the Department of Psychology. Learn more.