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American Journal of Epidemiology Advance Access originally published online on October 24, 2008
American Journal of Epidemiology 2008 168(12):1460-1469; doi:10.1093/aje/kwn265
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American Journal of Epidemiology © The Author 2008. Published by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

PRACTICE OF EPIDEMIOLOGY

Sensitivity Analysis Using Elicited Expert Information for Inference With Coarsened Data: Illustration of Censored Discrete Event Times in the AIDS Link to Intravenous Experience (ALIVE) Study

Michelle Shardell, Daniel O. Scharfstein, David Vlahov and Noya Galai

Correspondence to Dr. Michelle Shardell, Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, University of Maryland School of Medicine, 655 West Baltimore Street, Baltimore MD 21201 (e-mail: mshardel{at}epi.umaryland.edu).

Received for publication November 16, 2007. Accepted for publication July 31, 2008.

In this paper, the authors use the rubric of "coarsened data," of which missing and censored data are special cases, to motivate the elicitation and use of expert information for performing sensitivity analyses of censored event-time data. Elicited information is important because observed data are insufficient to estimate how study participants with coarsened data compare with participants with uncoarsened data, and misspecifying this comparison may produce biased analysis results. In the presence of coarsening, performing a sensitivity analysis over a range of plausible assumptions is the best one can do. Here the authors illustrate an approach for eliciting expert information for use in sensitivity analyses to compare cumulative incidence functions of censored nonmortality outcomes. An example of such data is the AIDS Link to Intravenous Experience (ALIVE) Study, where the authors aim to estimate and compare cumulative incidence functions for human immunodeficiency virus between risk factor categories. The interval and right-censoring and censoring due to death found in the ALIVE data (1988–1998) are thought to be informative; thus, a sensitivity analysis is performed using information elicited from 2 ALIVE scientists and an expert in acquired immunodeficiency syndrome epidemiology about the relation between seroconversion and censoring.

Bayesian analysis; frequentist approach; HIV; hypothesis test; incidence; interval censoring; sensitivity analysis

Abbreviations: ALIVE, AIDS Link to Intravenous Experience; CAR, coarsening at random; CI, confidence interval; CrI, credible interval; CNAR, coarsening not at random; HIV, human immunodeficiency virus


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