# Tag Info

58

Definitions vary, and the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably. I'll try to explain the most common uses using the following data set: $$1\qquad 1.25\qquad 2\qquad 4 \qquad 5$$ Censoring: some observations will be censored, meaning that we only know that they are below (or above) some bound. This can for instance occur if we measure the ...

47

Methods of censored regression can handle data like this. They assume the residuals behave as in ordinary linear regression but have been modified so that (Left censoring): all values smaller than a low threshold, which is independent of the data, (but can vary from one case to the other) have not been quantified; and/or (Right censoring): all values ...

24

I agree that van der Laan has a tendency to invent new names for already existing ideas (e.g. the super-learner), but TMLE is not one of them as far as I know. It is actually a very clever idea, and I have seen nothing from the Machine Learning community which looks similar (although I might just be ignorant). The ideas come from the theory of semiparametric-...

16

Censoring is often described in comparison with truncation. Nice description of the two processes is provided by Gelman et al (2005, p. 235): Truncated data differs from censored data that no count of observations beyond truncation point is available. With censoring the values of observations beyond the truncation point are lost, but their number is ...

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5

Any method of imputation including multiple imputation is a shot in the dark if you can't take acoount of how the data above 50 are distributed. Since you have 200 variables are any of them correlated with the biomarker? If you could fit a regression for the biomarker as a function of the covariates you could use that model to predict the values for the ...

5

I would follow Henry's tip and check Lyapunov with $\delta=1$. The fact that the distributions are mixed should not be a problem, as long as the $a_i$'s and $b_i$'s behave properly. Simulation of the particular case in which $a_i=0$, $b_i=1$, $k_i=2/3$ for each $i\geq 1$ shows that normality is ok. xbar <- replicate(10^4, mean(pmin(runif(10^4), 2/3))) ...

5

In this case you are ignoring that a payment between £0.01 and £100,000 is not the only choice but that not buying, i.e. £0 is a choice in itself as well. These are two separate selection mechanisms of which the first is continuous (the value of the payment) and the latter is discrete (the yes/no decision of buying at all). You can represent this by assuming ...

5

You could also try a range of plausible values for the unknown cases. Sort of a worst and best case scenario. So try 0, 1, 2, and 3, and see if any of those substantially alter the mean. If they do, you can discuss what the mean is under the best and worst case scenarios. If they do not, you can include that in your discussion as a justification.

5

If people are at risk, then you probably want to count them. If they get censored early, it will not affect things much, but if someone died after 1 week you would surely want to count that (doing anything else could induce survivorship bias). One question could be whether such patients were at risk for some of the outcomes (e.g. if an outcome can only be ...

5

The best way to implement a formula is first to analyze it, because often the way in which it is expressed theoretically is not a good way to compute it. To that end, let's split the sum into two parts: \lambda - f(\lambda,C) = \sum_{t=C}^\infty (t-C) \frac{\exp(-\lambda) \lambda^t}{t!} = e^{-\lambda}\sum_{t=C}^\infty t \frac{\lambda^t}{t!} - e^{-\...

5

According to Wikipedia, IQ test results are scaled so that the mean corresponds to a score of 100 points and the standard deviation corresponds to 15 points. Assuming a normal distribution, the proportion of scores that are more than 3 standard deviations below the mean (less than 55) is $\Phi(-3) \approx 0.001349898$. The proportion of scores that are ...

4

The Kaplan-Meier estimator is not biased when a large proportion of individuals are censored. One of the problems we often observe is that the majority of power for the log-rank test is derived from early failure times which are difficult to observe in KM curves. It does mean that the median survival time is an unreliable point estimate. However, the hazard ...

4

The first set of definitions seem right to me. Your adviser's definition two seems to be a conflation of independent and non-informative censoring assumptions. I haven't seen non-informative censoring defined before with reference to the covariate profile. The following text is from "Survival analysis: A self-learning text" by Kleinbaum and Klein (3rd ...

4

In concordance with Greg Snow's advice I've heard beta models are useful in such situations as well (see a Smithson & verkuilen, 2006, A Better Lemon Squeezer), as well as quantile regression (Bottai et al., 2010), but these seem like so pronounced floor and ceiling effects they may be inappropriate (especially the beta regression). Another alternative ...

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