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Listwise Deletion in High Dimensions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2022

J. Sophia Wang Open the ORCID record for J. Sophia Wang [Opens in a new window]  and
P. M. Aronow Open the ORCID record for P. M. Aronow [Opens in a new window]
J. Sophia Wang
Affiliation:
Graduate Student, Department of Political Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
P. M. Aronow*
Affiliation:
Associate Professor, Departments of Political Science, Biostatistics, and Statistics and Data Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
*
Corresponding author P. M. Aronow
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Abstract

We consider the properties of listwise deletion when both n and the number of variables grow large. We show that when (i) all data have some idiosyncratic missingness and (ii) the number of variables grows superlogarithmically in n, then, for large n, listwise deletion will drop all rows with probability 1. Using two canonical datasets from the study of comparative politics and international relations, we provide numerical illustration that these problems may emerge in real-world settings. These results suggest that, in practice, using listwise deletion may mean using few of the variables available to the researcher.

Keywords

missing datalistwise deletionhigh dimensional inference
Type
Letter
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , January 2023 , pp. 149 - 155
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology

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Footnotes

Edited by Jeff Gill

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