Choosing profile double-sampling designs for survival estimation with application to President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief evaluation.

ABSTRACT: Most studies that follow subjects over time are challenged by having some subjects who dropout. Double sampling is a design that selects and devotes resources to intensively pursue and find a subset of these dropouts, then uses data obtained from these to adjust naïve estimates, which are potentially biased by the dropout. Existing methods to estimate survival from double sampling assume a random sample. In limited-resource settings, however, generating accurate estimates using a minimum of resources is important. We propose using double-sampling designs that oversample certain profiles of dropouts as more efficient alternatives to random designs. First, we develop a framework to estimate the survival function under these profile double-sampling designs. We then derive the precision of the

SUBMITTER: An MW 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4013226 | biostudies-literature | 2014 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature