DOI

https://doi.org/10.25772/W1CJ-DR55

Defense Date

2016

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Biostatistics

First Advisor

Leroy Thacker, PhD

Second Advisor

R.K. Elswick, Jr., PhD

Abstract

In many clinical studies, continuous variables such as age, blood pressure and cholesterol are measured and analyzed. Often clinicians prefer to categorize these continuous variables into different groups, such as low and high risk groups. The goal of this work is to find the cutpoint of a continuous variable where the transition occurs from low to high risk group. Different methods have been published in literature to find such a cutpoint. We extended the methods of Contal and O’Quigley (1999) which was based on the log-rank test and the methods of Klein and Wu (2004) which was based on the Score test to find the cutpoint of a continuous covariate. Since the log-rank test is a nonparametric method and the Score test is a parametric method, we are interested to see if an extension of the parametric procedure performs better when the distribution of a population is known. We have developed a method that uses the parametric score residuals to find the cutpoint. The performance of the proposed method will be compared with the existing methods developed by Contal and O’Quigley and Klein and Wu by estimating the bias and mean square error of the estimated cutpoints for different scenarios in simulated data.

Rights

© The Author

Is Part Of

VCU University Archives

Is Part Of

VCU Theses and Dissertations

Date of Submission

8-5-2016

Included in

Biostatistics Commons

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