I created a data.frame() that has 8 time points each for 260 participants and a single score column for which I’m trying to impute some missing data. The data frame has 2080 (i.e., 8*260) rows by 3 columns (“month”, “ID”, “score”).

With this, I tried to run the following command:

a.out <- amelia(data, ts="month", cs="ID", polytime=2, intercs=TRUE, p2s=2)

It reported (which I terminated part way through after receiving errors):

amelia starting

beginning prep functions

Variables used: score time.1 time.2 time.3 time.4 time.5 time.6 time.7 time.8 time.9 time.10 time.11 time.12 time.13 time.14 time.15 time.16 time.17 time.18 time.19 time.20 time.21 time.22 time.23 time.24 time.25 time.26 time.27 time.28 time.29 time.30 time.31 time.32 time.33 time.34 time.35 time.36 time.37 time.38 time.39 time.40 time.41 time.42 time.43 time.44 time.45 time.46 time.47 time.48 time.49 time.50 time.51 time.52 time.53 time.54 time.55 time.56 time.57 time.58 time.59 time.60 time.61 time.62 time.63 time.64 time.65 time.66 time.67 time.68 time.69 time.70 time.71 time.72 time.73 time.74 time.75 time.76 time.77 time.78 time.79 time.80 time.81 time.82 time.83 time.84 time.85 time.86 time.87 time.88 time.89 time.90 time.91 time.92 time.93 time.94 time.95 time.96 time.97 time.98 time.99 time.100 time.101 time.102 time.103 time.104 time.105 time.106 time.107 time.108 time.109 time.110 time.111 time.112 time.113 time.114 time.115 time.116 time.117 time.118 time.119 time.120 time.... <truncated>

running bootstrap

-- Imputation 1 --

setting up EM chain indicies

1(300713)! 2

error: inv_sympd(): matrix seems singular

(216)! 3

error: inv_sympd(): matrix seems singular

(208)!

Warning message:

In amelia.prep(x = x, m = m, idvars = idvars, empri = empri, ts = ts, :

You have a small number of observations, relative to the number, of variables in the imputation model. Consider removing some variables, or reducing the order of time polynomials to reduce the number of parameters.

I don’t understand the error. I also don’t understand how it determined the `time.x` variables—I know it has something to do with my number of participants but I don’t understand how. The warning message suggests I have too many variables because of this. When I tried using the “freetrade" dataset, it used way fewer `time.x` variables (i.e., 26) even though there were only 19 time points in the data set and didn’t have problems.

Could someone explain to me about the error or what may be the problem and what I should do to correct it?

Also, when using time series data, do I use amelia() differently whether the time variable is treated as chronological time (e.g., January, February, March, …) or time of onset (e.g., one month since birth, two months since birth, etc.)?