Statistical Evaluation of Item Nonresponse Methods Using the World Bank’s 2015 Philippines Enterprise Survey

Abstract

The main objective of the study was to evaluate item nonresponse procedures through a simulation study of different nonresponse levels or missing rates. A simulation study was used to explore how each of the response rates performs under a variety of circumstances. It also investigated the performance of procedures suggested for item nonresponse under various conditions and variable trends. The imputation methods considered were the cell mean imputation, random hotdeck, nearest neighbor, and simple regression. These variables are some of the major indicators for measuring productive labor and decent work in the country. For the purpose of this study, the researcher is interested in evaluating methods for imputing missing data for the number of workers and total cost of labor per establishment from the World Bank’s 2015 Enterprise Survey for the Philippines.

The performances of the imputation techniques for item nonresponse were evaluated in terms of bias and coefficient of variation for accuracy and precision. Based on the results, the cell-mean imputation was seen to be most appropriate for imputing missing values for the total number of workers and total cost of labor per establishment. Since the study was limited to the variables cited, it is recommended to explore other labor indicators. Moreover, exploring choice of other clustering groups is highly recommended as clustering groups have great effect in the resulting estimates of imputation estimation. It is also recommended to explore other imputation techniques like multiple regression and other parametric models for nonresponse such as the Bayes estimation method. For regression based imputation, since the study is limited only in using the cluster groupings estimation, it is highly recommended to use other possible variables that might be related to the variable of interest to verify the results of this study.