Cumulative sojourn time in longitudinal studies: a sequential imputation method to handle missing health state data due to dropout.

ABSTRACT

Missing data are ubiquitous in longitudinal studies. In this paper, we propose an imputation procedure to handle dropouts in longitudinal studies. By taking advantage of the monotone missing pattern resulting from dropouts, our imputation procedure can be carried out sequentially, which substantially reduces the computation complexity. In addition, at each step of the sequential imputation, we set up a model selection mechanism that chooses between a parametric model and a nonparametric model to impute eachmissing observation. Unlike usual model selection procedures that aim at finding a single model fitting the entire data set well, our model selection procedure is customized to find a suitable model for the prediction of each missing observation.