A comparison of imputation methods in the 2012 behavioral risk factor surveillance survey

The U.S. government Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance (BRFSS) survey is an important source of demographic and health data. As with many surveys, BRFSS has missing data resulting from non-response. Because it is impossible to know the true value of missing data, the accuracy of imputation methods for real missing data cannot be known. To solve this problem, I created artificially missing data for two demographic variables for which the originally missing amounts were relatively small: age and race/ethnicity.