Asymptotics of Nonparametric Estimation under general non-monotone MAR missingness: A Bayesian Approach
About
Missing values are ubiquitous in statistical practice, with potentially detrimental consequences for any statistical analysis. As such, a wealth of methods and theoretical results have been developed in the last decades. However, many questions remain open, in particular in the case of general non-monotone missing at random (MAR), where nonparametric results are still lacking. In this paper, we extend nonparametric Bayesian theory to this MAR setting. We introduce a general theorem of posterior contraction under MAR and an additional positivity condition and apply this result to density estimation as well as regression problems. In particular, we show that, despite the missing values, the complete-data density can be estimated with the minimax posterior contraction rate up to logarithmic factors. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first nonparametric result showing that the complete-data distribution can be consistently estimated under Rubin's MAR definition. As a consequence, we obtain an algorithm that takes incomplete data and returns a sample from a consistent estimate of the complete-data distribution.