Case Fatality Ratio Estimates for the 2013-2016 West African Ebola Epidemic: Application of Boosted Regression Trees for Imputation.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The 2013-2016 West African Ebola epidemic has been the largest to date with >11 000 deaths in the affected countries. The data collected have provided more insight into the case fatality ratio (CFR) and how it varies with age and other characteristics. However, the accuracy and precision of the naive CFR remain limited because 44% of survival outcomes were unreported.

Methods

Using a boosted regression tree model, we imputed survival outcomes (ie, survival or death) when unreported, corrected for model imperfection to estimate the CFR without imputation, with imputation, and adjusted with imputation. The method allowed us to further identify and explore relevant clinical and demographic predictors of the CFR.

Results

The out-of-sample performance (95% confi

SUBMITTER: Forna A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7286386 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature