When data is partially missing at random, imputation and importance weighting
are often used to estimate moments of the unobserved population. In this paper,
we study 1-nearest neighbor (1NN) imputation, which replaces missing data with
the complete data that is the nearest neighbor in the non-missing covariate
space. We define an empirical measure, the 1NN measure, and show that it is
weakly consistent for the measure of the missing data. The main idea behind
this result is that 1NN imputation is performing inverse probability weighting
in the limit. We study applications to missing data and assessing the impact of
covariate shift in prediction tasks. We conclude with a discussion of using 1NN
imputation for domain adaptation in order to alleviate the impact of covariate
shift.