Handling Nonmonotone Missing Data with Available Complete-Case Missing Value Assumption

Abstract: Nonmonotone missing data is a common problem in scientific studies. The conventional ignorability and missing-at-random (MAR) conditions are unlikely to hold for nonmonotone missing data and data analysis can be very challenging with few complete data. In this paper, we introduce the available complete-case missing value (ACCMV) assumption for handling nonmonotone and missing-not-at-random (MNAR) problems. Our ACCMV assumption is applicable to data set with a small set of complete observations and we show that the ACCMV assumption leads to nonparametric identification of the distribution for the variables of interest. We further propose an inverse probability weighting estimator, a regression adjustment estimator, and a multiply-robust estimator for estimating a parameter of interest. We studied the underlying asymptotic and efficiency theories of the proposed estimators. We show the validity of our method with simulation studies and further illustrate the applicability of our method by applying it to a diabetes data set from electronic health records.