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Statistics vocabulary · Data and Variables

Missing data

Meaning in statistics, with examples

nounCore term

In statistics, missing data means: Values that should be in a data set but are not, for example because a respondent skipped a question or a measurement failed.

In Turkish: eksik veri, kayıp veri

How it is used

Researchers must report how much data were missing and how they handled it: listwise deletion, mean imputation or, usually better, multiple imputation. Missing data are classed as MCAR, MAR or MNAR, depending on why the values are missing.

Example sentences

  1. About 8% of the income data were missing, so we used multiple imputation.

  2. How did you deal with missing data in the follow-up survey?

Common collocations

  • handle missing data
  • pattern of missing data
  • multiple imputation
  • missing at random
  • listwise deletion
  • observationA single unit of data, such as one person, one transaction or one measurement, usually shown as one row in a data set.
  • variableAny characteristic that can take different values from one person, object or case to another, such as age, income, gender or test score.
  • nonresponse biasBias that arises when the people who do not take part in a survey differ in important ways from those who do, so the results misrepresent the population.
  • response rateThe share of people invited to take part in a survey who actually complete it, usually given as a percentage.

More terms: Data and Variables

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