Mean Imputation in R (Example)

This tutorial explains how to perform a mean imputation in the R programming language.

Example Data

vec <- c(4, NA, 7, 5, 7, 1, 6, 3, NA, 5)             # Create example vector

Our example data is a simple numeric vector with some NA values. Of cause, the same approach could be applied to a column of a data frame.

Imputing Missing Values by Mean

In order to impute the NA values in our data by the mean, we can use the is.na function and the mean function as follows:

vec[is.na(vec)] <- mean(vec[!is.na(vec)])            # Mean imputation

Our updated vector without missing data looks as follows:

vec                                                  # Print updated vector
# 4.00 4.75 7.00 5.00 7.00 1.00 6.00 3.00 4.75 5.00

The mean of our vector is 4.75 and for that reason all NA values were substituted (i.e. replaced) by the mean.