Propensity Scoring after Multiple Imputation in a Retrospective Study on Adjuvant Radiation Therapy in Lymph-Node Positive Vulvar Cancer

Eulenburg, Christine; Suling, Anna; Neuser, Petra; Reuss, Alexander; Canzler, Ulrich; Fehm, Tanja; Luyten, Alexander; Hellriegel, Martin; Woelber, Linn und Mahner, Sven (2016): Propensity Scoring after Multiple Imputation in a Retrospective Study on Adjuvant Radiation Therapy in Lymph-Node Positive Vulvar Cancer.
In: PLOS ONE 11(11), e0165705

Abstract

Propensity scoring (PS) is an established tool to account for measured confounding in non-randomized studies. These methods are sensitive to missing values, which are a common problem in observational data. The combination of multiple imputation of missing values and different propensity scoring techniques is addressed in this work. For a sample of lymph node-positive vulvar cancer patients, we re-analyze associations between the application of radiotherapy and disease-related and non-related survival. Inverse-probability-of-treatment-weighting (IPTW) and PS stratification are applied after multiple imputation by chained equation (MICE). Methodological issues are described in detail. Interpretation of the results and methodological limitations are discussed.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Faculties: Medicine
• Subjects: 600 Technology > 610 Medicine and health
• ISSN: 1932-6203
• Language: English