MICE, by Stef van Buuren and others, is an R package with many similarities to our “mi“. Actually, MICE came first, and it’s recently been updated. Should be available as an R download very soon. It would be interesting to see how the programs differ. We should probably look more carefully into cases where they give different results.
Shouldn't mi just be a front-end for MICE?
No. mi does things that MICE doesn't do (and I'm sure the reverse is true also). I think it's better for the two packages to be developed in parallel in the open-source world of R, then others can take from mi and MICE what they would like.