Online Program Home
  My Program

All Times EDT

Abstract Details

Activity Number: 461 - Design and Analytic Approaches to Address Unmeasured Confounding
Type: Contributed
Date/Time: Thursday, August 6, 2020 : 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM
Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
Abstract #311082
Title: Reducing Bias in the Test-Negative Design
Author(s): Iuliana Ciocanea-Teodorescu* and Martha Nason and Arvid Sjölander and Erin Gabriel
Companies: Karolinska Institute and NIAID, NIH and Karolinska Institute and Karolinska Institute
Keywords: test-negative design; vaccine effectiveness; bias; collapsibility; Ebola
Abstract:

The test-negative design is often used to estimate vaccine effectiveness in influenza studies, and has recently been proposed in the context of Ebola outbreaks. It was introduced as a variation of the case-control design, in an attempt to reduce confounding bias due to healthcare-seeking behaviour. However, examining the directed acyclic graphs that describe the test-negative design reveals that, without strong assumptions, the estimated odds ratio under this sampling mechanism is not collapsible over the selection variable, such that the results obtained for the sampled individuals cannot be generalised to the whole population. We show in extensive simulations that logistic regression consistently overestimates vaccine effectiveness, and results in inflated type I error rates. To mitigate this, we propose a variation of the test-negative design -- the severity-adjusted test-negative design. Conditioning on severity of disease alleviates bias considerably, and under certain assumptions even makes it possible to unbiasedly estimate a causal odds ratio.


Authors who are presenting talks have a * after their name.

Back to the full JSM 2020 program