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Categorical Variable, Imputation Methods, Missing Value, Re-Imputation Accuracy Rate.

Missing data are often encountered in data sets and a common problem for researchers in different fields of research. There are many reasons why observations may have missing values. For instance, some respondents may not report some of the items for some reason. The existence of missing data brings difficulties to the conduct of statistical analyses, especially when there is a large fraction of data which are missing. Many methods have been developed for dealing with missing data, numeric or categorical. The performances of imputation methods on missing data are key in choosing which imputation method to use. They are usually evaluated on how the missing data method performs for inference about target parameters based on a statistical model. One important parameter is the expected imputation accuracy rate, which, however, relies heavily on the assumptions of missing data type and the imputation methods. For instance, it may require that the missing data is missing completely at random. The goal of the current study was to develop a two-step algorithm to evaluate the performances of imputation methods for missing categorical data. The evaluation is based on the re-imputation accuracy rate (RIAR) introduced in the current work. A simulation study based on real data is conducted to demonstrate how the evaluation algorithm works.