Stef van Buuren - Böcker

Children learn to walk, speak, and think at an astonishing pace. The D-score presents a unified framework that places children and their developmental milestones from different tools onto the same scale, enabling comparisons in child development across populations, groups and individuals. This pioneering text explains why we need the D-score, how we construct it, and how we calculate it. It will be of interest not just to professionals in child development, but also to policymakers in international settings and to data scientists. Open Plus Books are published on an F1000-powered open research platform where they can be amended, updated, and extended, in addition to being published as a print and open access ebook. The Open Plus Book version of this book, available at gatesopenresearch.org/dscore, and the Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. For more information about Open Plus Books go to www.routledge.com and for F1000 go to f1000.com.

Children learn to walk, speak, and think at an astonishing pace. The D-score presents a unified framework that places children and their developmental milestones from different tools onto the same scale, enabling comparisons in child development across populations, groups and individuals. This pioneering text explains why we need the D-score, how we construct it, and how we calculate it. It will be of interest not just to professionals in child development, but also to policymakers in international settings and to data scientists. Open Plus Books are published on an F1000-powered open research platform where they can be amended, updated, and extended, in addition to being published as a print and open access ebook. The Open Plus Book version of this book, available at gatesopenresearch.org/dscore, and the Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. For more information about Open Plus Books go to www.routledge.com and for F1000 go to f1000.com.

Missing data pose challenges to real-life data analysis. Simple ad-hoc fixes, like deletion or mean imputation, only work under highly restrictive conditions, which are often not met in practice. Multiple imputation replaces each missing value by multiple plausible values. The variability between these replacements reflects our ignorance of the true (but missing) value. Each of the completed data set is then analyzed by standard methods, and the results are pooled to obtain unbiased estimates with correct confidence intervals. Multiple imputation is a general approach that also inspires novel solutions to old problems by reformulating the task at hand as a missing-data problem.This is the second edition of a popular book on multiple imputation, focused on explaining the application of methods through detailed worked examples using the MICE package as developed by the author. This new edition incorporates the recent developments in this fast-moving field.This class-tested book avoids mathematical and technical details as much as possible: formulas are accompanied by verbal statements that explain the formula in accessible terms. The book sharpens the reader’s intuition on how to think about missing data, and provides all the tools needed to execute a well-grounded quantitative analysis in the presence of missing data.