A Semiparametric Marginalized Model for Longitudinal Data with Informative Dropout.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Probability and Statistics Volume 2012, Article ID 734341, 15 pages doi:10.1155/2012/734341 Research Article A Semiparametric Marginalized Model for Longitudinal Data with Informative Dropout Mengling Liu1 and Wenbin Lu2 1 Division of Biostatistics, Department of Environmental Medicine, New York University School of Medicine, New York, NY 10016, USA 2 Department of Statistics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Mengling Liu, mengling.liu@ Received 1 April 2011; Revised 11 July 2011; Accepted 27 July 2011 Academic Editor: Yangxin Huang Copyright q 2012 M. Liu and W. Lu. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. We propose a marginalized joint-modeling approach for marginal inference on the association bet- ween longitudinal responses and covariates when longitudinal measurements are subject to in- formative dropouts. The proposed model is motivated by the idea of linking longitudinal respons- es and dropout times by latent variables while focusing on marginal inferences. We develop a sim- ple inference procedure based on a series of estimating equations, and the resulting estimators are consistent and asymptotically normal with a sandwich-type covariance matrix ready to be esti- mated by the usual plug-in rule. The performance of our approach is evaluated through simula- tions and illustrated with a renal disease data application. 1. Introduction Longitudinal studies often encounter data attrition because subjects drop out before the des- ignated study end. Both statistical analysis and practical interpr