Preprocesses a dataframe of matching covariates so the Mahalanobis distance can be calculated.
handleNA(X, verbose = FALSE)
a matrix containing the preprocessed data.
a matrix or dataframe of covariates to be used for matching
logical value indicating whether detailed output should be provided.
Luke Keele, Penn State University, ljk20@psu.edu
Sam Pimentel, University of California, Berkeley, spi@berkeley.edu
Preprocessing involves three main steps: (1) converting factors to matrices of dummy variables (2) for any variable with NAs, adding an additional binary variable indicating whether it is missing (3) imputing all NAs with the column mean. This follows the recommendations of Rosenbaum in section 9.4 of the referenced text.
Rosenbaum, Paul R. (2010). Design of Observational Studies. Springer-Verlag.