Review for NeurIPS paper: A Robust Functional EM Algorithm for Incomplete Panel Count Data

Weaknesses: - The MCAR assumption is difficult to justify in practice. This is good, however, could the authors clarify some of the following points regarding their method in the context of MCAR missingness. By definition, MCAR implies that one can simply ignore any rows of data containing missingness and restricting the analysis to so called "complete cases" will still result in unbiased estimates of the parameter of interest. In light of this, and the bounds on \epsilon implying that there will always be complete cases in the data as n - \infty (if this were not true, the parameters of interest would not be identifiable) what is the advantage of the proposed EM algorithm over simply doing complete case analysis and using some of the older tools cited in the paper that can be run on complete data. I apologize if I missed this, but it doesn't seem like there's a baseline comparison to such a complete case analysis or to the alternative of directly maximizing the observed data likelihood by integrating according to patterns of missingness.