IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0278913.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Imputation methods for missing failure times in recurrent-event survival analysis: Application to suicide attempts in the transgender population

Author

Listed:
  • Shanshan Liu
  • Sari L Reisner
  • Jody L Herman
  • Edie Weller

Abstract

Suicide risk among transgender populations is an important public health issue. In a project evaluating association between gender affirmation and suicide attempts in the US Transgender Survey, we evaluated the relationship between gender affirmation and risk for suicide attempts. One of the challenges is that the age at suicide attempts was only collected for the first and last attempt. The initial zero-inflated negative binomial model enabled us to evaluate the association between gender affirmation and number of suicide attempts per 5 years adjusting for other covariates. However, ignoring missing failure times of recurrent events may have caused bias and loss of efficiency. In this paper, we use a recurrent-event survival analysis incorporating time-varying covariates with three approaches to impute the age at suicide attempt, estimates from three imputation approaches are similar. We were able to confirm the findings from the initial model and identify additional associations that were not detected in the initial analysis. Findings suggest the need to consider additional analytical approaches in settings with high data missingness by design. Research to validate and compare measures that ask first and last attempt to those which enumerate all attempts in this population will be important for future surveys.

Suggested Citation

  • Shanshan Liu & Sari L Reisner & Jody L Herman & Edie Weller, 2022. "Imputation methods for missing failure times in recurrent-event survival analysis: Application to suicide attempts in the transgender population," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 17(12), pages 1-14, December.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0278913
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0278913
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0278913
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0278913&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0278913?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0278913. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.