Using matched substitutes to improve imputations for geographically linked databases - ARCHIVED

When administrative records are geographically linked to census block groups, local-area characteristics from the census can be used as contextual variables, which may be useful supplements to variables that are not directly observable from the administrative records. Often databases contain records that have insufficient address information to permit geographical links with census block groups; the contextual variables for these records are therefore unobserved. We propose a new method that uses information from "matched cases" and multivariate regression models to create multiple imputations for the unobserved variables. Our method outperformed alternative methods in simulation evaluations using census data, and was applied to the dataset for a study on treatment patterns for colorectal cancer patients.