Preserving logical relations while estimating missing values

Item-nonresponse is often treated by means of an imputation technique. In some cases, the data have to satisfy certain constraints, which are frequently referred to as edits. An example of an edit for numerical data is that the profit of an enterprise equals its turnover minus its costs. Edits place restrictions on the imputations that are allowed and hence complicate the imputation process. In this paper we explore an adjustment approach. This adjustment approach consists of three steps. In the first step, the imputation step, nearest neighbour hot deck imputation is used to find several pre-imputed values. In a second step, the adjustment step, these pre-imputed values are adjusted so the resulting records satisfy all edits. In a third step, the best donor record is selected. The adjusted record corresponding to that donor record is the final imputed record. In principle, a potential donor that is not the closest to the record to be imputed may still give the best results after adjustment. In this paper we therefore focus on the number of potential donor records that are considered in the imputation step. Keywords: Nearest-neighbour Imputation, Edit restrictions, Linear programming, Data adjustmen