Implications of covariate induced test dependence on the diagnostic accuracy of latent class analysis in pulmonary tuberculosis.

ABSTRACT:

Background

In application studies of latent class analysis (LCA) evaluating imperfect diagnostic tests, residual dependence among the diagnostic tests still remain even after conditioning on the true disease status due to measured variables known to affect prevalence and/or alter diagnostic test accuracy. Presence of severe comorbidities such as HIV in pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) diagnosis alter the prevalence of PTB and affect the diagnostic performance of the available imperfect tests in use. This violates two key assumptions of LCA: (1) that the diagnostic tests are independent conditional on the true disease status (2) that the sensitivity and specificity remain constant across subpopulations. This leads to incorrect inferences.

Methods

Through simulation we examined im

SUBMITTER: Keter AK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9468460 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature