ERIC Number: ED609849
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2016
Pages: 35
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: EISSN-
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Longitudinal Latent Variable Models Given Incompletely Observed Biomarkers and Covariates
Ren, Chunfeng; Shin, Yongyun
Grantee Submission
In this paper, we analyze a two-level latent variable model for longitudinal data from the National Growth of Health Study where surrogate outcomes or biomarkers and covariates are subject to missingness at any of the levels. A conventional method for efficient handling of missing data is to reexpress the desired model as a joint distribution of variables, including the biomarkers, that are subject to missingness conditional on all of the covariates that are completely observed, and estimate the joint model by maximum likelihood, which is then transformed to the desired model. The joint model, however, identifies more parameters than desired, in general. We show that the over-identified joint model produces biased estimation of the latent variable model, and describe how to impose constraints on the joint model so that it has a one-to-one correspondence with the desired model for unbiased estimation. The constrained joint model handles missing data efficiently under the assumption of ignorable missing data and is estimated by a modified application of the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. [This paper was published in "Statistics in Medicine" v35 n26 p4729-4745 2016.]
Publication Type: Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: Institute of Education Sciences (ED); National Institutes of Health (DHHS)
Authoring Institution: N/A
IES Funded: Yes
Grant or Contract Numbers: R305D130033; R01HL113697; 1U01HL101064
Author Affiliations: N/A