Applied Longitudinal Analysis

Garrett M. Fitzmaurice, Nan M. Laird, James H. Ware

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118551790
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Mathematics
• Subtopic: Probability & Statistics
• Index: Mathematics

Praise for the First Edition

"... [this book] should be on the shelf of everyone interested in... longitudinal data analysis."
— Journal of the American Statistical Association

Features newly developed topics and applications of the analysis of longitudinal data

Applied Longitudinal Analysis, Second Edition presents modern methods for analyzing data from longitudinal studies and now features the latest state-of-the-art techniques. The book emphasizes practical, rather than theoretical, aspects of methods for the analysis of diverse types of longitudinal data that can be applied across various fields of study, from the health and medical sciences to the social and behavioral sciences.

The authors incorporate their extensive academic and research experience along with various updates that have been made in response to reader feedback. The Second Edition features six newly added chapters that explore topics currently evolving in the field, including:

• Fixed effects and mixed effects models
• Marginal models and generalized estimating equations
• Approximate methods for generalized linear mixed effects models
• Multiple imputation and inverse probability weighted methods
• Smoothing methods for longitudinal data
• Sample size and power

Each chapter presents methods in the setting of applications to data sets drawn from the health sciences. New problem sets have been added to many chapters, and a related website features sample programs and computer output using SAS, Stata, and R, as well as data sets and supplemental slides to facilitate a complete understanding of the material.

With its strong emphasis on multidisciplinary applications and the interpretation of results, Applied Longitudinal Analysis, Second Edition is an excellent book for courses on statistics in the health and medical sciences at the upper-undergraduate and graduate levels. The book also serves as a valuable reference for researchers and professionals in the medical, public health, and pharmaceutical fields as well as those in social and behavioral sciences who would like to learn more about analyzing longitudinal data.

Part I

Introduction to Longitudinal and Clustered Data

Chapter 1

Longitudinal and Clustered Data

1.1 INTRODUCTION

Research on statistical methods for the design and analysis of human investigations expanded explosively in the second half of the twentieth century. Beginning in the early 1950s, the U.S. government shifted a substantial part of its research support from military to biomedical research. The legislative foundation for the modern National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Public Health Service Act, was passed in 1944 and NIH grew rapidly throughout the 1950s and 1960s. During these “golden years” of NIH expansion, the entire NIH budget grew from $8 million in 1947 to more than $1 billion in 1966. The NIH sponsored many of the important epidemiologic studies and clinical trials of that period, including the influential Framingham Heart Study (Dawber et al., 1951; Dawber, 1980).

The typical focus of these early studies was morbidity and, especially, mortality. Investigators sought to identify the causes of early death and to evaluate the effectiveness of treatments for delaying death and morbidity. In the Framingham Heart Study, participants were seen at two-year intervals. Survival outcomes during successive two-year periods were treated as independent events and modeled using multiple logistic regression. The successful use of multiple logistic regression in this setting, and the recognition that it could be applied to case-control data, led to widespread use of this methodology beginning in the 1960s. The analysis of time-to-event data was revolutionized by the seminal 1972 paper of D. R. Cox, describing the proportional hazards model (Cox, 1972). This paper was followed by a rich and important body of work that established the conceptual basis and the computational tools for modern survival analysis.

Although the design of the Framingham Heart Study and other cohort studies called for periodic measurement of the patient characteristics thought to be determinants of chronic disease, interest in the levels and patterns of change of those characteristics over time was initially limited. As the research advanced, however, investigators began to ask questions about the behavior of these risk factors. In the Framingham Heart Study, for example, investigators began to ask whether blood pressure levels in childhood were predictive of hypertension in adult life. In the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) Study, investigators sought to identify the determinants of the transition from normotensive or normocholesterolemic status in early adult life to hypertension and hypercholesterolemia in middle age (Friedman et al., 1988). In the treatment of arthritis, asthma, and other diseases that are not typically life-threatening, investigators began to study the effects of treatments on the level and change over time in measures of severity of disease. Similar questions were being posed in every disease setting. Investigators began to follow populations of all ages over time, both in observational studies and clinical trials, to understand the development and persistence of disease and to identify factors that alter the course of disease development.

This interest in the temporal patterns of change in human characteristics came at a period when advances in computing power made new and more computationally intensive approaches to statistical analysis available at the desktop. Thus, in the early 1980s, Laird and Ware proposed the use of the EM algorithm to fit a class of linear mixed effects models appropriate for the analysis of repeated measurements (Laird and Ware, 1982); Jennrich and Schluchter (1986) proposed a variety of alternative algorithms, including Fisher-scoring and Newton–Raphson algorithms. Later in the decade, Liang and Zeger introduced the generalized estimating equations in the biostatistical literature and proposed a family of generalized linear models for fitting repeated observations of binary and counted data (Liang and Zeger, 1986; Zeger and Liang, 1986). Many other investigators writing in the biomedical, educational, and psychometric literature contributed to the rapid development of methodology for the analysis of these “longitudinal” data. The past 30 years have seen considerable progress in the development of statistical methods for the analysis of longitudinal data. Despite these important advances, methods for the analysis of longitudinal data have been somewhat slow to move into the mainstream. This book bridges the gap between theory and application by presenting a comprehensive description of methods for the analysis of longitudinal data accessible to a broad range of readers.

1.2 LONGITUDINAL AND CLUSTERED DATA

The defining feature of longitudinal studies is that measurements of the same individuals are taken repeatedly through time, thereby allowing the direct study of change over time. The primary goal of a longitudinal study is to characterize the change in response over time and the factors that influence change. With repeated measures on individuals, one can capture within-individual change. Indeed, the assessment of within-subject changes in the response over time can only be achieved within a longitudinal study design. For example, in a cross-sectional study, where the response is measured at a single occasion, one can only obtain estimates of between-individual differences in the response. That is, a cross-sectional study may allow comparisons among sub-populations that happen to differ in age, but it does not provide any information about how individuals change during the corresponding period.

To highlight this important distinction between cross-sectional and longitudinal study designs, consider the following simple example. Body fatness in girls is thought to increase just before or around menarche, leveling off approximately 4 years after menarche. Suppose that investigators are interested in determining the increase in body fatness in girls after menarche. In a cross-sectional study design, investigators might obtain measurements of percent body fat on two separate groups of girls: a group of 10-year-old girls (a pre-menarcheal cohort) and a group of 15-year-old girls (a post-menarcheal cohort). In this cross-sectional study design, direct comparison of the average percent body fat in the two groups of girls can be made using a two-sample (unpaired) t-test. This comparison does not provide an estimate of the change in body fatness as girls age from 10 to 15 years. The effect of growth or aging, an inherently within-individual effect, simply cannot be estimated from a cross-sectional study that does not obtain measures of how individuals change with time. In a cross-sectional study the effect of aging is potentially confounded with possible cohort effects. Put in a slightly different way, there are many characteristics that differentiate girls in these two different age groups that could distort the relationship between age and body fatness. On the other hand, a longitudinal study that measures a single cohort of girls at both ages 10 and 15 can provide a valid estimate of the change in body fatness as girls age. In the longitudinal study the analysis is based on a paired t-test, using the difference or change in percent body fat within each girl as the outcome variable. This within-individual comparison provides a valid estimate of the change in body fatness as girls age from 10 to 15 years. Moreover, since each girl acts as her own control, changes in percent body fat throughout the duration of the study are estimated free of any between-individual variation in body fatness.

A distinctive feature of longitudinal data is that they are clustered. In longitudinal studies the clusters are composed of the repeated measurements obtained from a single individual at different occasions. Observations within a cluster will typically exhibit positive correlation, and this correlation must be accounted for in the analysis. Longitudinal data also have a temporal order; the first measurement within a cluster necessarily comes before the second measurement, and so on. The ordering of the repeated measures has important implications for analysis. There are, however, many studies in the health sciences that are not longitudinal in this sense but which give rise to data that are clustered or cluster-correlated. For example, clustered data commonly arise when intact groups are randomized to health interventions or when naturally occurring groups in the population are randomly sampled. An example of the former is group-randomized trials. In a group-randomized trial, also known as a cluster-randomized trial, groups of individuals, rather than each individual alone, are randomized to different treatments or health interventions. Data on the health outcomes of interest are obtained on all individuals within a group. Alternatively, clustered data can arise from random sampling of naturally occurring groups in the population. Families, households, hospital wards, medical practices, neighborhoods, and schools are all instances of naturally occurring clusters in the population that might be the primary sampling units in a study. Finally, clustered data can arise when data on the health outcome of interest are simultaneously obtained either from multiple raters or from different measurement instruments.

In all these examples of clustered data, we might reasonably expect that measurements on units within a cluster are more similar than the measurements on units in different clusters. The degree of clustering can be expressed in terms of correlation among the measurements on units within the same cluster. This correlation invalidates the crucial assumption of independence that is the cornerstone of so many standard statistical techniques. Instead, statistical models for clustered data must explicitly describe and account for this correlation. Because longitudinal data are a special case of clustered data, albeit with a natural ordering of the measurements within a cluster, this book includes a description of modern methods of analysis for clustered data, more broadly defined. Indeed, one of the goals of this book is to demonstrate that methods for the analysis of longitudinal data are, more or less, special cases of more general regression methods for clustered data. As a result a comprehensive understanding of methods for the analysis of longitudinal data provides the basis for a broader understanding of methods for analyzing the wide range of clustered data that commonly arises in studies in the biomedical and health sciences.

The examples described above consider only a single level of clustering, for example, repeated measurements on individuals. More recently investigators have developed methodology for the analysis of multilevel data, in which observations may be clustered at more than one level. For example, the data may consist of repeated measurements on patients clustered by clinic. Alternatively, the data may consist of observations on children nested within classrooms, nested within schools. Although the analysis of multilevel data is not the primary focus of this book, multilevel data are discussed in Chapter 22.

Interest in the analysis of longitudinal and multilevel data continues to grow. New and more flexible models have been developed and advances in computation, such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, have allowed greater flexibility in model specification. Moreover, improvements in statistical software packages, especially SAS, Stata, SPSS, R, and S-Plus, have made these models much more accessible for use in routine data analysis. Despite these advances, however, methods for the analysis of longitudinal data are not widely used ...