Power analysis for ordinal logistic regression

Question

I am looking for a program (in R or SAS or standalone, if free or low cost) that will do power analysis for ordinal logistic regression.

Answer 1

I prefer to do power analyses beyond the basics by simulation. With precanned packages, I am never quite sure what assumptions are being made.

Simulating for power is quite straight forward (and affordable) using R.

1. decide what you think your data should look like and how you will analyze it
2. write a function or set of expressions that will simulate the data for a given relationship and sample size and do the analysis (a function is preferable in that you can make the sample size and parameters into arguments to make it easier to try different values). The function or code should return the p-value or other test statistic.
3. use the replicate function to run the code from above a bunch of times (I usually start at about 100 times to get a feel for how long it takes and to get the right general area, then up it to 1,000 and sometimes 10,000 or 100,000 for the final values that I will use). The proportion of times that you rejected the null hypothesis is the power.
4. redo the above for another set of conditions.

Here is a simple example with ordinal regression:

library(rms)

tmpfun <- function(n, beta0, beta1, beta2) {
    x <- runif(n, 0, 10)
    eta1 <- beta0 + beta1*x
    eta2 <- eta1 + beta2
    p1 <- exp(eta1)/(1+exp(eta1))
    p2 <- exp(eta2)/(1+exp(eta2))
    tmp <- runif(n)
    y <- (tmp < p1) + (tmp < p2)
    fit <- lrm(y~x)
    fit$stats[5]
}

out <- replicate(1000, tmpfun(100, -1/2, 1/4, 1/4))
mean( out < 0.05 )