A semiparametric marginalized model for longitudinal data with informative dropout

Abstract

We propose a marginalized joint-modeling approach for marginal inference on the association between longitudinal responses and covariates when longitudinal measurements are subject to informative dropouts. The proposed model is motivated by the idea of linking longitudinal responses and dropout times by latent variables while focusing on marginal inferences. We develop a simple inference procedure based on a series of estimating equations, and the resulting estimators are consistent and asymptotically normal with a sandwich-type covariance matrix ready to be estimated by the usual plug-in rule. The performance of our approach is evaluated through simulations and illustrated with a renal disease data application. Copyright © 2012 Mengling Liu and Wenbin Lu.