Please join us for the next installment of the MGH Biostatistics Applied Biostatistics Seminar Series, a new seminar series designed to introduce researchers to intermediate topics that are highly relevant to clinical biostatistical research. Presenters will join us on every 3rd Friday of each month to introduce us to their area of expertise and motivate the use of these methods with concrete clinical examples.
An Introduction to Interval-Censored Failure Time Data, with Applications to HIV Prevention Trials
Friday March 18, 2022, 1:00-2:00pm
https://partners.zoom.us/j/86995026265
Speaker: Kaitlyn Cook, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare Institute
Abstract: Interval-censored failure time data naturally arise in biomedical and epidemiological studies in which the event of interest is subject to periodic follow-up (as in electronic health records research) or otherwise not directly observable (as in infectious disease prevention studies). Since questionnaires, physical exams, blood cultures, and serological tests are conducted on an intermittent basis, the exact timing of this event is known only up to the interval between the last negative and first positive tests. When the subjects in these studies also belong to existing, non-investigator determined groups—such as hospitals, communities, transmission networks, or insurance networks—the resulting data may be both interval-censored and clustered. The presence of these two features leads to a loss of statistical information and power and presents complications for both estimation and inference. In this talk, I will provide an introduction to interval-censored failure time data and discuss some common methods for analyzing this data in the independent data setting. I will then introduce a novel extension of the proportional hazards framework to the clustered data context, and will illustrate its use by re-analyzing a large-scale cluster-randomized trial of combination HIV prevention methods.
This will be a virtual event. Please contact tthaweethai@mgh.harvard.edu with any questions.
Upcoming seminars:
Friday April 15, 2022 (1-2pm): Steven J. Skates, PhD, Associate Investigator at MGH Biostatistics and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Topic: Longitudinal Biomarkers for Early Detection of Cancer
