Ignorability conditions for frequentist non parametric analysis of conditional distributions with incomplete data

Rubin (1976 Rubin, D.B. (1976). Inference and missing data. Biometrika 63(3):581–592.Crossref], Web of Science ®] , Google Scholar]) derived general conditions under which inferences that ignore missing data are valid. These conditions are sufficient but not generally necessary, and therefore may be relaxed in some special cases. We consider here the case of frequentist estimation of a conditional cdf subject to missing outcomes. We partition a set of data into outcome, conditioning, and latent variables, all of which potentially affect the probability of a missing response. We describe sufficient conditions under which a complete-case estimate of the conditional cdf of the outcome given the conditioning variable is unbiased. We use simulations on a renal transplant data set (Dienemann et al.) to illustrate the implications of these results.