Identification of Missing Data and Imputation in Vaccination Rates for an Ecological Study of the Southern Cone of South America in Four Countries

In epidemiological studies with ecological design, it is common practice to work with country-level data, which arise from secondary data sources. For this reason, a harmonization process must be carried out in order to ensure the quality and completeness of the data, as a fundamental element of what is known as reproducible research. This allows other researchers to replicate the results by accessing the same repositories, which are usually international portals that publish statistical data in the health area, such as the WHO, the World Bank or the statistical institutes or health ministries of each country. This harmonization process that guarantees reproducibility has as a fundamental stage the transparency of the process of identifying missing data and any modification that is made when imputing and allowing for complete data, which expands the use of different statistical techniques. This work shows the entire process followed for a group of vaccination rates, including visualization and various imputation methods that are appropriate to the nature of the data, for 4 countries in the Southern Cone for a period of 20 years. The details of this project are on the OSF platform in the project Analysis of different demographic, social, and economic indicators and their association with a group of immunopreventable diseases for 4 countries in the Southern Cone of South America at https://osf.io/6r3ew/.