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mifa
is an R package that implements multiple imputation
of covariance matrices to allow to perform factor analysis on incomplete
data. It works as follows:
Impute missing values multiple times using Multivariate Imputation with Chained Equations (MICE) from the mice package.
Combine the covariance matrices of the imputed data sets into a single covariance matrix using Rubin’s rules[1]
Use the combined covariance matrix for exploratory factor analysis.
mifa
also provides two types of confidence intervals for
the variance explained by different numbers of principal components:
Fieller confidence intervals (parametric) for larger
samples[2] and bootstrapped confidence intervals
(nonparametric) for smaller samples.[3]
For more information about the method, see:
Nassiri, V., Lovik, A., Molenberghs, G., Verbeke, G. (2018). On using multiple imputation for exploratory factor analysis of incomplete data. Behavior Research Methods 50, 501–517. doi: 10.3758/s13428-017-1013-4
Note: The paper was accompanied by an implementation in R, and this package emerged from it. The repository appears to have been abandoned by the authors, but you can still find it here.
You can install mifa
from GitHub with:
# install.packages("devtools")
::install_github("teebusch/mifa") devtools
For this example we use the bfi
data set from the
psych
package. It contains 2,800 subjects’ answers to 25
personality self-report items and 3 demographic variables (sex,
education, and age). Each of the 25 personality questions is meant to
tap into one of the “Big 5” personality factors, as indicated by their
names: Openness, Conscientiousness,
Agreeableness, , Extraversion,
Neuroticism. There are missing responses for most
items. Instead of dropping the incomplete cases from the analysis, we
will use mifa
to impute them, and then perform a factor
analysis on the imputed covariance matrix.
First, we use mifa()
to impute the covariance matrix and
get an idea how many factors we should use. We use the
cov_vars
argument to tell mifa
to use
gender
, education
, and age
for
the imputations, but exclude them from the covariance matrix:
library(mifa)
library(psych)
<- mifa(
mi data = bfi,
cov_vars = -c(gender, education, age),
n_pc = 2:8,
ci = "fieller",
print = FALSE
)
mi#> Imputed covariance matrix of 25 variables
#>
#> Variable: A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 E1 E2 E3 E4 E5 N1 N2 N3 N4 N5 O1 O2 O3 O4 O5
#> N Imputed: 16 27 26 19 16 21 24 20 26 16 23 16 25 9 21 22 21 11 36 29 22 0 28 14 20
#>
#> Number of MICE imputations: 5
#> Additional variables used for imputations:
#> gender education age
#>
#> Cumulative proportion of variance explained by n principal components:
#>
#> n prop Fieller CI
#> 2 0.33 [0.32, 0.34]
#> 3 0.41 [0.40, 0.42]
#> 4 0.48 [0.47, 0.49]
#> 5 0.54 [0.53, 0.55]
#> 6 0.59 [0.58, 0.59]
#> 7 0.62 [0.61, 0.63]
#> 8 0.66 [0.65, 0.66]
It looks like the first 5 principal components explain more than half
of the variance in the responses, so we perform a factor analysis with 5
factors, using the fa()
function from the
psych
package. We can get the imputed covariance matrix of
our data from mi$cov_combined
. From there on, it’s business
as usual.
<- fa(mi$cov_combined, n.obs = nrow(bfi), nfactors = 5) fit
The factor diagram shows that the five factors correspond nicely to the 5 types of questions:
fa.diagram(fit)
We can add the factor scores to the original data, in order to explore group differences. Because we need complete data to calculate factor scores, we first impute a single data set with mice:
<- mice::complete(mice::mice(bfi, 1, print = FALSE))
data_imp
<- data.frame(factor.scores(data_imp[, 1:25], fit)$scores)
fct_scores
<- data.frame(
data_imp Gender = factor(data_imp$gender),
Extraversion = fct_scores$MR1,
Neuroticism = fct_scores$MR2,
Conscientious = fct_scores$MR3,
Openness = fct_scores$MR4,
Agreeableness = fct_scores$MR5
)
levels(data_imp$Gender) <- c("Male", "Female")
Then we can visualize the group differences:
library(ggplot2)
library(tidyr)
<- tidyr::pivot_longer(data_imp, -Gender, "factor")
data_imp2
ggplot(data_imp2) +
geom_density(aes(value, linetype = Gender)) +
facet_wrap(~ factor, nrow = 2) +
theme(legend.position = c(.9, .1))
[1] Rubin D. B. Multiple imputation for nonresponse in surveys (2004). John Wiley & Sons.
[2] Fieller, E. C. (1954). Some problems in interval estimation. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B (Methodological): 175-185.
[3] Shao, J. & Sitter, R. R. (1996). Bootstrap for imputed survey data. Journal of the American Statistical Association 91.435 (1996): 1278-1288. doi: 10.1080/01621459.1996.10476997
These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.
Health stats visible at Monitor.