Improving main analysis by borrowing information from auxiliary data.

ABSTRACT

In many clinical and observational studies, auxiliary data from the same subjects, such as repeated measurements or surrogate variables, will be collected in addition to the data of main interest. Not directly related to the main study, these auxiliary data in practice are rarely incorporated into the main analysis, though they may carry extra information that can help improve the estimation in the main analysis. Under the setting where part of or all subjects have auxiliary data available, we propose an effective weighting approach to borrow the auxiliary information by building a working model for the auxiliary data, where improvement of estimation precision over the main analysis is guaranteed regardless of the specification of the working model. An information index is also constructed to assess how well the selected working model works to improve the main analysis. Both theoretical and numerical studies show the excellent and robust performance of the proposed method in comparison to estimation without using the auxiliary data. Finally, we utilize the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities study for illustration.