impute

Verb

impute (third-person singular simple present imputes, present participle imputing, simple past and past participle imputed)

1. (transitive) To attribute or ascribe (responsibility or fault) to a cause or source.
   • The teacher imputed the student's failure to his nervousness.
   • Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault, / If mem’ry o’er their tomb no trophies raise, / Where thro’ the long-drawn isle and fretted vault, / The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.1751, Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, lines 37–40

   Synonyms:

   attribute, insinuate, charge, imply, accredit, ascribe, attach, chalk up to, draw, lay

2. (transitive) To ascribe (sin or righteousness) to someone by substitution.
   • To use the technical language of theologians, God through his grace "imputes" the merits of the crucified and risen Christ to a fallen human being who remains without inherent merit, and who without this "imputation" would not be "made" righteous at all.2009, Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, Penguin (2010), page 607
3. (transitive) To take into account.
   • They ſerved with honour in the wars of Bajazet; but a plan of fortifying Conſtantinople excited his jealouſy: he threatened their lives; the new works were inſtantly demoliſhed; and we ſhall beſtow a praiſe, perhaps above the merit of Palæologus, if we impute this laſt humiliation as the cauſe of...1788, Edward Gibbon, “Chapter 64: A.D. 1355–1391: The Emperor John Palæologus; Discord of the Greeks”, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, volume 6, page 328

   Synonyms:

   consider, regard, reckon

4. (transitive) To attribute, ascribe, blame, or credit to.
   • People impute great cleverness to cats.
   • In any case, the practices imputed to Shakespeare as an emergent dramatist were not in the least exceptional.2014, Janet Clare, Shakespeare's Stage Traffic, page 11

   Synonyms:

   attribute, ascribe, assign, allege

5. (transitive) To replace missing data with substituted values.
   • We will use a logistic regression model to impute values of nominal and ordinal variables and a linear regression model to impute values of continuous variables.2010, Mamdouh Refaat, Data Preparation for Data Mining Using SAS, Elsevier, →ISBN, page 184
   • remove observed values and impute2012, Stef van Buuren, Flexible Imputation of Missing Data, page 263