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The package missingHE
is specifically designed to
facilitate the implementation of different types of missing data models
to conduct trial-based health economic evaluations from a
Bayesian statistical perspective. The main
justification for the use of Bayesian models in economic evaluations is
related to the decision-making nature of the problem, which imposes the
need to assess the impact of different sources of uncertainty both on
the statistical and cost-effectiveness results.
While frequentist methods are popular among practitioners, they require ad-hoc steps for quantifying the uncertainty around the estimated quantities of interest. Examples include the need to perform some form of bootstrapping to generate standard cost-effectiveness outputs (e.g. cost-effectiveness planes and acceptability curves), or the use of multiple imputation to account for missingness uncertainty. Although these steps can lead to statistically valid results, in practice, when the complexity of the model is increased (for example to deal with common statistical issues of the data such as correlation, clustering, missingness or skewenss), then the task of correctly combining all these steps may become incredibly difficult. The Bayesian approach, instead, allows to fit the model of interest while simultaneously handling all the different issues related to the data as well as to correctly propagate and quantify uncertainty for each unobserved quantitiy in the model (being a parameter or a missing value).
Different types of missing data models exist, each with its own
advantages and disadvantages when it comes down to the strategy used to
handle missingness. missingHE
implements three types of
models: selection models, pattern
mixture models, and hurdle models. All models
are implemented via Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms
based on the BUGS
language and the Bayesian program
JAGS
. For techincal details and an overview of the software
see https://mcmc-jags.sourceforge.io/.
For each model, the package provides a series of ancillary functions
for assessing convergence of the algorithm, checking the fit to the
data, extracting and summarising the results. This brief tutorial aims
at helping getting started with the package and its main functions.
Throughout the document, we will use the built-in dataset called
MenSS
as a toy example, which is directly available when
installing and loading missingHE
in your R
workspace. It is important to remember that missingHE
only
allows the analysis of two-arm studies (comparison of more than two
intervantions is not currently supported) and is designed to handle
missing values only in the outcome variables (no missing values in the
covariates are allowed).
If you would like to have more information on the package, or would like to point out potential issues in the current version, feel free to contact the maintainer at a.gabrio@maastrichtuniversity.nl. Suggestions on how to improve the package are also very welcome.
The Men’s Safer Sex (MenSS) trial was a pilot randomised controlled trial conducted on young men at risk of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). A total of \(159\) individuals were enrolled in the trial, \(75\) in the comparator group (\(t=1\), standard of care) and \(84\) in the reference group (\(t=2\), standard of care plus online intervention). Clinical and health economic outcomes were collected via self-reported questionnaires at baseline, \(3\), \(6\), and \(12\) months follow-ups.
Health economic data included utility scores based on health-related quality of life (from EQ5D-3L) and costs based on resource use information (from CSRI). QALYs and Total costs were derived from aggregating the utility and cost data using the area under the curve method and by summing up the follow-up costs over the trial duration, respectively.
Clinical data included the number of instances of unprotected sex and whether or not each individual was associated with an STI diagnosis.
The dataset MenSS
includes the main variables of
interest for the economic evaluation: the individual-level QALYs and
baseline utilities, Total costs, as well as the number of instances of
unprotected sex and the STI diagosis indicator at baseline and \(12\) months follow-up. Additional baseline
variables provided are: id, treatment indicator, age, ethnicity,
employment status and site. We can display a summary description of the
variables in MenSS
by using the str
command
> str(MenSS)
#> 'data.frame': 159 obs. of 13 variables:
#> $ id : int 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...
#> $ u.0 : num 0.725 0.848 0.848 1 0.796 ...
#> $ e : num NA 0.924 NA NA NA 0.943 NA NA NA 0.631 ...
#> $ c : num NA 0 NA NA NA 0 NA NA NA 516 ...
#> $ age : int 23 23 27 27 18 25 48 30 24 27 ...
#> $ ethnicity : Factor w/ 2 levels "0","1": 1 1 2 1 1 2 2 2 2 1 ...
#> $ employment: Factor w/ 2 levels "0","1": 1 2 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 ...
#> $ t : int 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ...
#> $ sex_inst.0: num 25 30 6 20 1 20 6 4 1 12 ...
#> $ sex_inst : int NA 50 3 0 99 NA 20 NA NA NA ...
#> $ sti.0 : int 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 ...
#> $ sti : int 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ...
#> $ site : Factor w/ 3 levels "1","2","3": 1 3 3 1 3 1 1 1 1 2 ...
We can look at the empirical distributions of the data, for example
the QALYs (\(e\)) and Total costs
(\(c\)) variables, by treatment arm to
have a general idea about what type of issues seem to be relevant for
our analysis. Remember that, when using your own dataset, variables must
be assigned specific names when using the functions from
missingHE
. In particular, the treatment arm indicator
should take value \(1\) and \(2\) for the control and intervention group,
while the effectiveness and cost variables should be assigned the names
\(e\) and \(c\), respectively.
> par(mfrow=c(2,2))
> hist(MenSS$e[MenSS$t==1], main = "QALYs - Control")
> hist(MenSS$e[MenSS$t==2], main = "QALYs - Intervention")
> hist(MenSS$c[MenSS$t==1], main = "Costs - Control")
> hist(MenSS$c[MenSS$t==2], main = "Costs - Intervention")
We can immediately see that non-normality seems to be relatively high in both the QALYs (negatively skewed) and Total costs (positively skewed) in each treatment group. In addition, there is a considerable amount of identical or structural values for both outcomes (ones for QALYs and zeros for costs), which increases the degree of skewness in the data. The proportions of these structural values by type of outome and treatment group can be extracted using the following commands
> #proportions of ones and zeros in the control group
> c(sum(MenSS$e[MenSS$t==1]==1, na.rm = TRUE) / length(MenSS$e[MenSS$t==1]),
+ sum(MenSS$c[MenSS$t==1]==0, na.rm = TRUE) / length(MenSS$e[MenSS$t==1]))
[1] 0.12000000 0.09333333
>
> #proportions of ones and zeros in the intervention group
> c(sum(MenSS$e[MenSS$t==2]==1, na.rm = TRUE) / length(MenSS$e[MenSS$t==2]),
+ sum(MenSS$c[MenSS$t==2]==0, na.rm = TRUE) / length(MenSS$e[MenSS$t==2]))
[1] 0.09523810 0.05952381
Finally, the proportions of missing values is considerably large for both outcomes and intervention groups.
> #proportions of missing values in the control group
> c(sum(is.na(MenSS$e[MenSS$t==1])) / length(MenSS$e[MenSS$t==1]),
+ sum(is.na(MenSS$c[MenSS$t==1])) / length(MenSS$e[MenSS$t==1]))
[1] 0.64 0.64
>
> #proportions of missing values in the intervention group
> c(sum(is.na(MenSS$e[MenSS$t==2])) / length(MenSS$e[MenSS$t==2]),
+ sum(is.na(MenSS$c[MenSS$t==2])) / length(MenSS$e[MenSS$t==2]))
[1] 0.7738095 0.7738095
If you inspect the data, for example using the View()
command, you will see that the missingness patterns are exactly the same
between QALYs and Total costs, which can only be either both observed or
both missing.
So, let us start with the first type of missingness model, known as
selection models, which can be fitted using the
function selection
. These require the specification of four
models.
The first two, denoted with the terms model.eff
and
model.cost
, are the models of interest for the
effectiveness (\(e\)) and cost (\(c\)) variables, where covariates can be
included via a linear formula. A joint bivariate model can also be
specified by including \(e\) as a
covariate inside the model for \(c\) to
account for the potential dependence between the outcomes. Alternative
distributions can be selected for both variables using the arguments
dist_e
and dist_c
. Type
help(selection)
for the list of the available
distributions.
The last two, denoted with the terms model.me
and
model.mc
, are the auxiliary models for the missingness
indicators of the effects and costs, also know as missingness
mechanisms. These are fitted to estimate the missingness
probabilities using logistic regressions and allow the inclusion of
covariates in the same way as the models of interest.
The type of missingness assumptions can be specified using the
argument type
, which can be set to be either
"MAR"
(for a missing at random assumption) or
"MNAR"
(for a missing not at random assumption). Although
typically inadequate, missing completely at random (MCAR) assumptions
can also be specified by fitting the model under MAR without the
inclusion of covariates in any of the models.
Optional arguments that can also be specified are:
n.iter
(number of MCMC iterations); inits
(initial values - by default randomly generated); ppc
(whether or not results for posterior predictive checks should be stored
- default is no); save_model
(whether or not a .txt file of
the JAGS
code of the model should be printed in the current
wd - deafult is no); prior
(choice of prior values -
default are weakly-informative).
> NN.sel=selection(data = MenSS, model.eff = e ~ u.0, model.cost = c ~ e,
+ model.me = me ~ age + ethnicity + employment,
+ model.mc = mc ~ age + ethnicity + employment, type = "MAR",
+ n.iter = 1000, dist_e = "norm", dist_c = "norm", ppc = TRUE)
The command above fits a selection model to the MenSS
dataset assuming normal distributions for both the effectiveness and
cost variables, adjusting for baseline utilities in the model of \(e\) and accounting for the dependence with
\(e\) in the model of \(c\). Missingness is handled under MAR and
three baseline variables (age, ethnicity and employment status) are
included in the models of me
and mc
. In case
categorical covariates are inlcuded in the models, it is important to
define them as factors in the data. missingHE
automatically
decomposes factor variables into a series of dummy variables, while also
removing the one associated with the first level of the factors to avoid
perfect collinearity. The argument ppc = TRUE
allows to
store the results for doing some posterior checks to assess the model
performance if desired (default is FALSE
) - see later on
this.
We can print the results from the selection model, which are stored
in the object NN.sel
, by typing
> print(NN.sel, value.mis = FALSE, only.means = TRUE)
mean sd 2.5% 97.5% Rhat n.eff
mu_c[1] 237.129 50.998 134.023 335.980 1.001 1000
mu_c[2] 185.151 38.788 107.044 262.080 1.000 1000
mu_e[1] 0.874 0.017 0.839 0.908 1.006 820
mu_e[2] 0.916 0.022 0.874 0.960 1.002 990
The command produces summary statistics of the marginal mean effects
(\(\mu_e\)) and costs (\(\mu_c\)) posterior distributions by
treatment group, including mean, sd, \(95\%\) credible intervals and two MCMC
diagnostic measures (Rhat
and n.eff
). If we
set value.mis = TRUE
and only.means = FALSE
,
then the same results are displayed for each parameter and imputed value
of the model.
It is also possible to extract summary statistics for the regression
coefficients from the model of \(e\)
and \(c\) using the generic function
coef
, which gives
> coef(NN.sel, random = FALSE)
$Comparator
$Comparator$Effects
mean sd lower upper
(Intercept) 0.187 0.141 -0.097 0.451
u.0 0.780 0.152 0.490 1.089
$Comparator$Costs
mean sd lower upper
(Intercept) 237.129 50.998 134.023 335.980
e -986.507 420.947 -1849.887 -170.828
$Reference
$Reference$Effects
mean sd lower upper
(Intercept) 0.662 0.075 0.499 0.816
u.0 0.287 0.087 0.114 0.472
$Reference$Costs
mean sd lower upper
(Intercept) 185.151 38.788 107.044 262.08
e -170.822 349.572 -835.884 514.79
The function returns the posterior mean, sd and \(95\%\) bounds for each coefficient
associated with the outcome models, separately by treatment (comparator
and reference group) on the scale of the regression. In case normal
distributions are chosen, this is the natural scale of the variables in
the data but for other distributions either log or logit scales are
used. See help(selection)
for more details. When the
optional argument is set random = TRUE
, the coefficient
estimates for the random effects in the model (if specified) are
displayed.
Finally, a summary of the cost-effectiveness results from the model can be displayed by typing
> summary(NN.sel)
Cost-effectiveness analysis summary
Comparator intervention: intervention 1
Reference intervention: intervention 2
Parameter estimates under MAR assumption
Comparator intervention
mean sd LB UB
mean effects (t = 1) 0.874 0.017 0.847 0.902
mean costs (t = 1) 237.129 50.998 149.082 319.98
Reference intervention
mean sd LB UB
mean effects (t = 2) 0.916 0.022 0.88 0.952
mean costs (t = 2) 185.151 38.788 118.665 249.975
Incremental results
mean sd LB UB
delta effects 0.042 0.028 -0.003 0.087
delta costs -51.978 63.39 -156.004 50.04
ICER -1243.818
Standard economic outputs are provided, including summary statistics
for the mean effects and costs by treatment group and the incremental
means and ICER between the two groups. It is also possible to use
functions from the package BCEA
to produce graphical
outputs of cost-effectiveness, such as the cost-effectiveness plane and
acceptability curve based on the results of the model. This can be
achieved, for example by typing
> par(mfrow=c(1,2))
> BCEA::ceplane.plot(NN.sel$cea)
> BCEA::ceac.plot(NN.sel$cea)
For more information on how to interpret and customise these plots,
see the BCEA
package.
The second type of missingness model available in
missingHE
are pattern mixture models,
which can be fitted using the function pattern
. These
require the specification of two models.
The models are denoted with the terms model.eff
and
model.cost
, and refer to the effectiveness and cost models
in a similar way to what shown for selection
in terms of
related arguments, including the type of distributons and missingness
assumptions. If the model is fitted under MAR, the argument
Delta_e
and Delta_c
must be set to \(0\). These are the priors on the
sensitivity parameters which can be used to specify a MNAR assumption
and that should therefore be removed under MAR.
However, in contrast to selection models, the models for \(e\) and \(c\) in pattern
are fitted
within each missingness pattern in the dataset. Patterns are defined
only based on the number of individuals with observed and missing
outcome data, for a total of \(4\)
maximum number of patterns. Parameters that cannot be identified from
the data (because missing) are identified using some modelling
restrictions. Two types of restrictions are available in
missingHE
: "CC"
and "AC"
, which
can be set using the argument restriction
. The first
identifies all unidentified parameters by setting them equal to the
parameters estimated from the complete cases, while the second using
those estimated from the available cases (patterns where the other
outcome is missing). Type help(pattern)
for more
information on the assumptions of the model.
Although not directly accessible from pattern
, the
function implicitly fits a model for the probability of being associated
with each missingness pattern in the data. This model is estimated using
multinomial distributions and weakly-informative priors on all pattern
probabilities. Posterior estimates for these parameters are then used to
compute the weighted mean effects and costs across the
patterns.
> NN.pat=pattern(data = MenSS, model.eff = e ~ u.0, model.cost = c ~ e,
+ type = "MAR", restriction = "CC", n.iter = 1000, Delta_e = 0, Delta_c = 0,
+ dist_e = "norm", dist_c = "norm", ppc = TRUE)
The model above assumes normal distributions for both outcomes under a MAR assumption and uses complete case restrictions to identify the parameters in each pattern. We can inspect the results by doing
> coef(NN.pat, random = FALSE)
$Comparator
$Comparator$Effects
mean sd lower upper
(Intercept) pattern1 0.177 0.141 -0.104 0.442
u.0 pattern1 0.790 0.152 0.500 1.101
(Intercept) pattern2 0.177 0.141 -0.104 0.442
u.0 pattern2 0.790 0.152 0.500 1.101
$Comparator$Costs
mean sd lower upper
(Intercept) pattern1 240.664 50.559 141.894 341.652
e pattern1 -981.941 413.543 -1755.334 -146.819
(Intercept) pattern2 240.664 50.559 141.894 341.652
e pattern2 -981.941 413.543 -1755.334 -146.819
$Reference
$Reference$Effects
mean sd lower upper
(Intercept) pattern1 0.666 0.075 0.515 0.809
u.0 pattern1 0.284 0.086 0.121 0.460
(Intercept) pattern2 0.666 0.075 0.515 0.809
u.0 pattern2 0.284 0.086 0.121 0.460
$Reference$Costs
mean sd lower upper
(Intercept) pattern1 185.828 40.278 106.707 260.997
e pattern1 -179.191 351.793 -835.809 570.342
(Intercept) pattern2 185.828 40.278 106.707 260.997
e pattern2 -179.191 351.793 -835.809 570.342
which shows the presence of only two patterns in the dataset, given
that estimates from only two patterns are displayed for each model. Note
that estimates are exactly the same between the patterns, suggesting
that one of the two is the complete case pattern and the other is formed
by completely missing individuals (for whom estimates are set equal to
those from the complete cases by setting restriction = "CC"
inside pattern
).
Aggregted mean estimates over the patterns can be retrieved using
print
or, together with summary CEA results, using the
summary
command
> summary(NN.pat)
Cost-effectiveness analysis summary
Comparator intervention: intervention 1
Reference intervention: intervention 2
Parameter estimates under MAR assumption
Comparator intervention
mean sd LB UB
mean effects (t = 1) 0.873 0.017 0.846 0.901
mean costs (t = 1) 240.664 50.559 158.242 326.213
Reference intervention
mean sd LB UB
mean effects (t = 2) 0.917 0.023 0.88 0.953
mean costs (t = 2) 185.828 40.278 118.855 250.737
Incremental results
mean sd LB UB
delta effects 0.043 0.028 -0.005 0.092
delta costs -54.836 64.173 -155.426 53.818
ICER -1265.664
Standard graphical economic outputs based on the model results can
again be obtained using functions from the BCEA
package.
The last type of missingness model that can be fitted in
missingHE
are hurdle models, implemented
via the function hurdle
. These require the specification of
four models.
The first two are the models for \(e\) and \(c\) and are very similar to those used in
selection
. However, hurdle models are not technically
speaking missingness models in that they do not allow to choose among
specific missingness assumptions. They consist in two-part regressions
designed to handle the presence of structural values in the data. The
presence/absence of structural values in the effects and costs data can
be specified in the function using the arguments se
and
sc
. They must be set to NULL
if the structural
values in one of the outcomes is absent, and must be set equal to the
actual structural value if these are present.
The last two models are fitted to the indicator variables
associated with the presence or absence of a structural value for each
individual in the data, denoted with the terms model.se
and
model.sc
. These models estimate the probability of being
associated with a structural effect and cost value using logistic
regressions in a similar fashion to the models model.me
and
model.mc
in selection
. Once these
probabilities are esitmated, the overall mean effects and costs in each
arm are obtained through a weighted average between the means of the
non-structural component (obtained from the models of \(e\) and \(c\)) and the corresponding probabilities of
having a structural value.
Due to the construction of hurdle models, the argument
type
takes different values compared to the standard
MAR/MNAR assumptions in that the assumptions of the model are related to
the probability of having a structural value rather than a missing
value. missingHE
allows to choose among Structural
Completely At Random (SCAR) and Structural At Random (SAR)
assumptions, the difference being the absence or presence of some
covariate in the model for the structural probabilities. Within a
Bayesian approach, hurdle models can be extended to impute missing
values without the need of any ad-hoc imputation steps. We refer to
help(hurdle)
for more details on the assumptions behind
hurdle models.
> NN.hur=hurdle(data = MenSS, model.eff = e ~ u.0, model.cost = c ~ e,
+ model.se = se ~ 1, model.sc = sc ~ age, type = "SAR", se = 1, sc = 0,
+ n.iter = 1000, dist_e = "norm", dist_c = "norm", ppc = TRUE)
The fitted model allows for the presence of structural ones in \(e\) (se = 1
) and zeros in
\(c\) (sc = 0
) under a SAR
assumoptions using age as a predictor for estimating the probability of
having a structural value for both outcomes. We can extract the results
from the regressions of \(e\) and \(c\) by typing
> coef(NN.hur, random = FALSE)
$Comparator
$Comparator$Effects
mean sd lower upper
(Intercept) 0.315 0.195 -0.077 0.708
u.0 0.617 0.220 0.165 1.052
$Comparator$Costs
mean sd lower upper
(Intercept) 261.929 62.783 138.516 387.400
e -759.380 486.114 -1656.729 184.005
$Reference
$Reference$Effects
mean sd lower upper
(Intercept) 0.73 0.085 0.559 0.895
u.0 0.14 0.112 -0.081 0.354
$Reference$Costs
mean sd lower upper
(Intercept) 257.846 43.939 168.379 341.323
e 38.304 400.528 -736.141 799.748
If interest is in the estimates for the parameters indexing the
models of se
and sc
, the entire posterior
distributions for these (as well as those of any other parameter of the
model) can be extracted by accessing the elements stored inside the
model_output
list, available by typing
NN.hur$model_output
.
Finally, economic results can be summarised as
> summary(NN.hur)
Cost-effectiveness analysis summary
Comparator intervention: intervention 1
Reference intervention: intervention 2
Parameter estimates under SAR assumption
Comparator intervention
mean sd LB UB
mean effects (t = 1) 0.907 0.02 0.874 0.939
mean costs (t = 1) 193.686 50.982 114.238 278.878
Reference intervention
mean sd LB UB
mean effects (t = 2) 0.915 0.027 0.869 0.956
mean costs (t = 2) 186.536 40.441 121.785 252.568
Incremental results
mean sd LB UB
delta effects 0.008 0.033 -0.044 0.06
delta costs -7.15 65.692 -116.464 98.783
ICER -868.657
and further exploration of the results can be done using the package
BCEA
.
Before even looking at the results of the models fitted using
selection
, pattern
or hurdle
, it
is recommended to check for possible issues in the convergence of the
MCMC algorithm which, if present, may hinder the validity of the
inferences. This is standard practice when fitting models based on
iterative simulation methods, such as MCMC, where a larger number of
iterations may be required to ensure the stability of the results.
missingHE
allows to implement different types of
convergence diagnostics for each type of model via the function
diagnostic
. For example, consider the selection model that
we fitted before and saved into the object NN.sel
. We can
examine posterior density plots for the mean effects by
treatment arm by typing
> diagnostic(NN.sel, type = "denplot", param = "mu.e", theme = NULL)
The plots above do not indicate any potential issue in terms of failed convergence since estimates from both chains seem to overlap quite well (i.e. a single posterior distribution for each parameter seems to be reached).
type
is used to select the desired type of
diagnostic measure (see help(diagnostic)
for a list of all
types available). For example, we can look at trace plots for
the mean costs estimated from the pattern mixture model by typing> diagnostic(NN.pat, type = "traceplot", param = "mu.c", theme = NULL)
param
denotes the parameter for which the
diagnostics should be shown. The list of parameters that can be selected
varies depending on the type of model fitted
(e.g. selection
or hurdle
) and the assumptions
made (e.g. MAR or MNAR). Type help(diagnostic)
for the full
list of parameters available for each type of model and assumptions. It
is also possible to set param = "all"
to display the
diagnostic results of all parameters in the model together. For example,
we can look at the autocorrelation plots for the posterior
distribution of the probability of having a structural zero costs in the
hurdle model by typing> diagnostic(NN.hur, type = "acf", param = "p.c", theme = "base")
theme
selects the type of backgroung theme
to be used for plotting, chosen among a pre-defined set of themes whose
names can be seen by typing help(diagnostic)
.It is possible to look at how missing outcome values are imputed by
each type of model using the generic function plot
that,
when applied to an object generated by missingHE
functions,
such as the model stored in NN.sel
, produces the following
output
> plot(NN.sel, class = "scatter", outcome = "all")
The four plots show the observed values (black dots) and the posterior distribution of the imputed values (red dots and lines) by type of outcome (effects top, costs bottom) and treatment group (control left, intervention right).
class
specifies what type of graphical
output should be displayed, either a scatter plot (scatter
- default option) or a histogram (histogram
). For example,
we can show the histogram of the imputations produced by the pattern
mixture model by typing> plot(NN.pat, class = "histogram", outcome = "all")
outcome
specifies for which outcome the
results should be shown. Available choices include either all variables
in both groups (all
- default), only the effects or costs
variables (effects
and costs
), only the
variables in a specific group (arm1
and arm2
)
or a combination of these. For example, we can look at the distributions
of the imputed costs in the control group for the hurdle model by
typing> plot(NN.hur, class = "scatter", outcome = "costs_arm1")
We can check the fit of the models to the observed data by looking at posterior predictive checks (PPC) and compare the fit of altenative model specifications via preditive information criteria (PIC). Both measures are really useful when checking whether or not the results from the model align with the information from the observed data and for choosing the best models among those considered.
The idea behind PPCs consists in using the estimated parameters from the model to generate replications of the data, which can then be compared with the observed values to detect possible inconsistencies in the replications. The main objective is to see whether the model is able to capture some aspects of the data which are of interest (e.g. mean, skeness, proportions of structural values, etc…), which would suggest a good fit of the model.
You can implement different types of checks in missingHE
using the function ppc
. For example, we can look at
replicates of the histograms of the data for the effects in the control
group based on the results of the selection model by typing
> ppc(NN.sel, type = "histogram", outcome = "effects_arm1", ndisplay = 8)
type
selects the type of check to display.
Different types of plots can be drawn using specific names. See
help(ppc)
for the full list of choices. The argument
ndisplay
indicates the number of replications that should
be displayed for the comparison. For example, we can compare the
observed and replicated kernel densities for the effects in the control
group based on the results from the pattern mixture model by typing> ppc(NN.pat, type = "dens", outcome = "effects_arm1", ndisplay = 8)
outcome
chooses the type of variables for
which results should be displayed. Available options include:
all
for both effects and costs in each treatment group,
effects
and costs
for the corresponding
outcomes in each group, and a combination of these. See
help(ppc)
for the list of all options. For example, we can
look at overlayed densities between observed and replicated data for all
variables based on the results from the hurdle model by typing> ppc(NN.hur, type = "dens_overlay", outcome = "all", ndisplay = 25)
PICs compare the fit to the observed data form alternative model specifications in terms of a measure based on the loglikelihood of the model (deviance) and a penalty term for model complexity (effective number of parameters). The key message is that models associated with lower PIC values have a better fit to the observed data compared with models associated with higher PIC values. It is very important to remember that, when dealing with partially-observed data, the fit of the model can only be assessed based on the observed values. Thus, comparison by means of PICs is always partial since the fit to the unobserved values can never be checked. This is why it is generally not recommened to compare models fitted under MNAR assumptions as the comparison may be completely meaningless.
Three main types of PICs can be selected in missingHE
via the pic
function. Choices include: the Deviance
Information Criterion (DIC), the Widely Applicable Inofrmation
Criterion (WAIC), and the Leave-One-Out Information
Criterion (LOOIC). Among these, the latter two are typically
preferred as they are calculated on the full posterior distribution of
the model and do not suffer from some potential drawbacks
(e.g. reparameterisation of the model) that may instead affect the DIC.
Type help(pic)
for more details about these measures. For
example, we can compare the fit to the observed data from the three
models fitted using WAIC by typing
> pic_sel <- pic(NN.sel, criterion = "waic", module = "both")
> pic_pat <- pic(NN.pat, criterion = "waic", module = "both")
> pic_hur <- pic(NN.hur, criterion = "waic", module = "both")
>
> #print results
> c(pic_sel$waic, pic_pat$waic, pic_hur$waic)
[1] 539.2823 539.0758 -465.3983
The results indicate a much better fit of the hurdle model compared to the others, with a WAIC estimate which is negative. This is reasonable since hurdle models can capture the structural values which are instead ignored by selection or pattern mixture models. However, hurdle models do not allow the exploration of MNAR assumptions and therefore their results are entirely based on MAR.
The argument criterion
specifies the type of PIC to use
for the assessment, while module
indicates for which parts
of the model the measure should be evaluated. Choices are:
total
(default), which shoul be used for comparing models
having the same structure; both
, which uses both the models
for \(e\) and \(c\) but not the auxiliary models
(e.g. those for me
and mc
in
selection
); e
or c
, which use
only the model for the effects or costs.
These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.