Thank you for a quick and helpful reply Matt!

I have never used R before, so I am not familiar with R and how the program works. I have only worked with SPSS before. I feel that I need better basic knowledge about R before I am able to run the imputations in R.

However, I tried out your other solution and added variables to the imputation model in a stepwise manner. With this method I was able to identify the culprit. I had an item that asked participants to rank 4 alternatives in order of importance. The answers were represented as 4 variables which of course were dependent of one another. The answer always seems simple one's you've got it.

Thank you so much for your help.

Happy imputing!

Best wishes
Gró

Från: Matt Blackwell [mblackwell@gov.harvard.edu]
Skickat: den 8 oktober 2014 15:00
Till: Gró Einarsdóttir
Kopia: amelia@lists.gking.harvard.edu
Ämne: Re: [amelia] Crashing when pressing impute

Hi Gró, 

I worry that there is something wrong with the data itself. Are there odd text strings in the data of some the variables? If you could run the imputation in R instead of AmeliaView, we could get a more informative error message and maybe have a better guess as to what is going on. 

Another guess is that your data has some variables that are nearly linearly dependent. That is, you might have a bunch of scores and the sum or mean of those scores all included in the data. Maybe you could try a different strategy---put almost all of the variables into the ID vars and then see if it runs and then add variables one at a time to see the culprit. 

Cheers,
Matt

On Wed, Oct 8, 2014 at 8:35 AM, Gró Einarsdóttir <gro.einarsdottir@psy.gu.se> wrote:
Hi Renzo!

Thank you so much for your quick reply and helpful comments! I really appreciate it!

I examined the data using bivariate correlations for all variables and found that several variables had correlations above .80. So I excluded these variables from the analysis by changing them to ID variables and ran the imputations. This seemed to help because I got the information that the imputation was successful. I got five excel files as output.

When I wanted to do the same thing again with my other datasample (I have 3 datasamples with similar variables) the program started crashing again. I tried a couple of times by excluding more variables but the program kept on crashing.
In order to understand more about the problem I went back to the start, and tried conducting the same analysis again with the first data sample (and excluded the same variables again). When I did this the program continued on crashing.

I really do not know how to move on from here. Any suggestions?

All the best
Gró Einarsdóttir
PhD student
Gothenburgs University
Från: amelia-bounces@lists.gking.harvard.edu [amelia-bounces@lists.gking.harvard.edu] för Renzo Carriero [renzo.carriero@unito.it]
Skickat: den 7 oktober 2014 14:29
Till: amelia@lists.gking.harvard.edu
Ämne: Re: [amelia] Crashing when pressing impute

Hi Gro,

I had a similar problem, but then I realized I made a mistake with the imputation model. There were some near collinear variables, if I remember well. As soon as I discarded them, the imputation ran well. My advice, however, is to use Amelia in R, it is not that difficult, it is sufficient to copy and edit some lines from the documentation.

Best
Renzo Carriero
University of Turin, Italy
 

Il 07/10/2014 13.12, Gró Einarsdóttir ha scritto:
Dear Amelia mailing list,

First, let me say that I really appreciate all the help I can get with this problem. Thank you for providing this great service for free and for all your hard work. Now to the issue.

Being disappointed with the Multiple imputation function in SPSS I was very excited when I came across Amelia II. Because I am not familiar with working with R I was even more excited learning about the Amelia view function.

So I installed the latest version of R and Amelia II, view version and uploaded my survey data.
I have N=611 and 87 variables. There is about 25% missing values. I am able to open both R and Amelia view without problems and upload my data. However, when I press impute this error message below appears and the program crashes

R for Windows terminal front end has stopped working.
A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available.

This error message is very vague and I do not know what the problem is.

I have tried the program on a different PC, I have installed the amelia package again and tried using different data samples.

I also got some help from the open science frameworks statistics help. The statistics consultant there was able to run some multiple imputations using my data so the problem does not seem to be with the data sample.

Any ideas about what the problem might be and how I can move forward?

All the best
Gró Einarsdóttir
PhD student
Gothenburgs University


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