Publications by Keith Goldfeld
A minor update to simstudy provides an excuse to talk a bit about the negative binomial and Poisson distributions
I just updated simstudy to version 0.1.5 (available on CRAN) so that it now includes several new distributions – exponential, discrete uniform, and negative binomial. As part of the release, I thought I’d explore the negative binomial just a bit, particularly as it relates to the Poisson distribution. The Poisson distribution is a discrete (i...
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Can we use B-splines to generate non-linear data?
I’m exploring the idea of adding a function or set of functions to the simstudy package that would make it possible to easily generate non-linear data. One way to do this would be using B-splines. Typically, one uses splines to fit a curve to data, but I thought it might be useful to switch things around a bit to use the underlying splines to g...
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Who knew likelihood functions could be so pretty?
I just released a new iteration of simstudy (version 0.1.6), which fixes a bug or two and adds several spline related routines (available on CRAN). The previous post focused on using spline curves to generate data, so I won’t repeat myself here. And, apropos of nothing really – I thought I’d take the opportunity to do a simple simulation to...
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Thinking about different ways to analyze sub-groups in an RCT
Here’s the scenario: we have an intervention that we think will improve outcomes for a particular population. Furthermore, there are two sub-groups (let’s say defined by which of two medical conditions each person in the population has) and we are interested in knowing if the intervention effect is different for each sub-group. And here’s t...
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A simstudy update provides an excuse to generate and display Likert-type data
I just updated simstudy to version 0.1.7. It is available on CRAN. To mark the occasion, I wanted to highlight a new function, genOrdCat, which puts into practice some code that I presented a little while back as part of a discussion of ordinal logistic regression. The new function was motivated by a reader/researcher who came across my blog in w...
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Visualizing how confounding biases estimates of population-wide (or marginal) average causal effects
When we are trying to assess the effect of an exposure or intervention on an outcome, confounding is an ever-present threat to our ability to draw the proper conclusions. My goal (starting here and continuing in upcoming posts) is to think a bit about how to characterize confounding in a way that makes it possible to literally see why improperly ...
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Characterizing the variance for clustered data that are Gamma distributed
Way back when I was studying algebra and wrestling with one word problem after another (I think now they call them story problems), I complained to my father. He laughed and told me to get used to it. “Life is one big word problem,” is how he put it. Well, maybe one could say any statistical analysis is really just some form of multilevel dat...
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When you use inverse probability weighting for estimation, what are the weights actually doing?
Towards the end of Part 1 of this short series on confounding, IPW, and (hopefully) marginal structural models, I talked a little bit about the fact that inverse probability weighting (IPW) can provide unbiased estimates of marginal causal effects in the context of confounding just as more traditional regression models like OLS can. I used an exa...
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When there’s a fork in the road, take it. Or, taking a look at marginal structural models.
I am going to cut right to the chase, since this is the third of three posts related to confounding and weighting, and it’s kind of a long one. (If you want to catch up, the first two are here and here.) My aim with these three posts is to provide a basic explanation of the marginal structural model (MSM) and how we should interpret the estimat...
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Simulating a cost-effectiveness analysis to highlight new functions for generating correlated data
My dissertation work (which I only recently completed – in 2012 – even though I am not exactly young, a whole story on its own) focused on inverse probability weighting methods to estimate a causal cost-effectiveness model. I don’t really do any cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) anymore, but it came up very recently when some folks in the N...
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