Marginal and Conditional Distribution Estimation from Double-Sampled Semi-Competing Risks Data.

ABSTRACT: Informative dropout is a vexing problem for any biomedical study. Most existing statistical methods attempt to correct estimation bias related to this phenomenon by specifying unverifiable assumptions about the dropout mechanism. We consider a cohort study in Africa that uses an outreach program to ascertain the vital status for dropout subjects. These data can be used to identify a number of relevant distributions. However, as only a subset of dropout subjects were followed, vital status ascertainment was incomplete. We use semi-competing risk methods as our analysis framework to address this specific case where the terminal event is incompletely ascertained and consider various procedures for estimating the marginal distribution of dropout and the marginal and conditional distributions o

SUBMITTER: Yu M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4764884 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature