Estimation of Conditional Prevalence From Group Testing Data With Missing Covariates. Issue 529 (2nd January 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Delaigle, Aurore; Huang, Wei; Lei, Shaoke
• Is Part Of: Journal of the American Statistical Association. Volume 115:Issue 529(2020)
• Page Start: 467
• Page End: 480
• Publication Date: 2020-01-02
• Subjects: Bandwidth -- Kernel -- Likelihood -- Local polynomial -- Pooled data -- Spline; Statistics -- Periodicals; Statistics -- Periodicals; Statistiques -- Périodiques; États-Unis -- Statistiques -- Périodiques; 519.5
• DOI: 10.1080/01621459.2019.1566071
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0162-1459

Abstract

Abstract: We consider estimating the conditional prevalence of a disease from data pooled according to the group testing mechanism. Consistent estimators have been proposed in the literature, but they rely on the data being available for all individuals. In infectious disease studies where group testing is frequently applied, the covariate is often missing for some individuals. There, unless the missing mechanism occurs completely at random, applying the existing techniques to the complete cases without adjusting for missingness does not generally provide consistent estimators, and finding appropriate modifications is challenging. We develop a consistent spline estimator, derive its theoretical properties, and show how to adapt local polynomial and likelihood estimators to the missing data problem. We illustrate the numerical performance of our methods on simulated and real examples. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.