Dataset Information

Residuals and Diagnostics for Ordinal Regression Models: A Surrogate Approach.

ABSTRACT: Ordinal outcomes are common in scientific research and everyday practice, and we often rely on regression models to make inference. A long-standing problem with such regression analyses is the lack of effective diagnostic tools for validating model assumptions. The difficulty arises from the fact that an ordinal variable has discrete values that are labeled with, but not, numerical values. The values merely represent ordered categories. In this paper, we propose a surrogate approach to defining residuals for an ordinal outcome Y. The idea is to define a continuous variable S as a "surrogate" of Y and then obtain residuals based on S. For the general class of cumulative link regression models, we study the residual's theoretical and graphical properties. We show that the residual has null properties similar to those of the common residuals for continuous outcomes. Our numerical studies demonstrate that the residual has power to detect misspecification with respect to 1) mean structures; 2) link functions; 3) heteroscedasticity; 4) proportionality; and 5) mixed populations. The proposed residual also enables us to develop numeric measures for goodness-of-fit using classical distance notions. Our results suggest that compared to a previously defined residual, our residual can reveal deeper insights into model diagnostics. We stress that this work focuses on residual analysis, rather than hypothesis testing. The latter has limited utility as it only provides a single p-value, whereas our residual can reveal what components of the model are misspecified and advise how to make improvements.

SUBMITTER: Liu D

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6133273 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Residuals and Diagnostics for Ordinal Regression Models: A Surrogate Approach.

Liu Dungang D Zhang Heping H

Journal of the American Statistical Association 20180606 522

Ordinal outcomes are common in scientific research and everyday practice, and we often rely on regression models to make inference. A long-standing problem with such regression analyses is the lack of effective diagnostic tools for validating model assumptions. The difficulty arises from the fact that an ordinal variable has discrete values that are labeled with, but not, numerical values. The values merely represent ordered categories. In this paper, we propose a surrogate approach to defining ...[more]

PMID: 30220754

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Project description:BackgroundLogistic random effects models are a popular tool to analyze multilevel also called hierarchical data with a binary or ordinal outcome. Here, we aim to compare different statistical software implementations of these models.MethodsWe used individual patient data from 8509 patients in 231 centers with moderate and severe Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) enrolled in eight Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) and three observational studies. We fitted logistic random effects regression models with the 5-point Glasgow Outcome Scale (GOS) as outcome, both dichotomized as well as ordinal, with center and/or trial as random effects, and as covariates age, motor score, pupil reactivity or trial. We then compared the implementations of frequentist and Bayesian methods to estimate the fixed and random effects. Frequentist approaches included R (lme4), Stata (GLLAMM), SAS (GLIMMIX and NLMIXED), MLwiN ([R]IGLS) and MIXOR, Bayesian approaches included WinBUGS, MLwiN (MCMC), R package MCMCglmm and SAS experimental procedure MCMC.Three data sets (the full data set and two sub-datasets) were analysed using basically two logistic random effects models with either one random effect for the center or two random effects for center and trial. For the ordinal outcome in the full data set also a proportional odds model with a random center effect was fitted.ResultsThe packages gave similar parameter estimates for both the fixed and random effects and for the binary (and ordinal) models for the main study and when based on a relatively large number of level-1 (patient level) data compared to the number of level-2 (hospital level) data. However, when based on relatively sparse data set, i.e. when the numbers of level-1 and level-2 data units were about the same, the frequentist and Bayesian approaches showed somewhat different results. The software implementations differ considerably in flexibility, computation time, and usability. There are also differences in the availability of additional tools for model evaluation, such as diagnostic plots. The experimental SAS (version 9.2) procedure MCMC appeared to be inefficient.ConclusionsOn relatively large data sets, the different software implementations of logistic random effects regression models produced similar results. Thus, for a large data set there seems to be no explicit preference (of course if there is no preference from a philosophical point of view) for either a frequentist or Bayesian approach (if based on vague priors). The choice for a particular implementation may largely depend on the desired flexibility, and the usability of the package. For small data sets the random effects variances are difficult to estimate. In the frequentist approaches the MLE of this variance was often estimated zero with a standard error that is either zero or could not be determined, while for Bayesian methods the estimates could depend on the chosen "non-informative" prior of the variance parameter. The starting value for the variance parameter may be also critical for the convergence of the Markov chain.

Dataset Information

Residuals and Diagnostics for Ordinal Regression Models: A Surrogate Approach.

Publications

Residuals and Diagnostics for Ordinal Regression Models: A Surrogate Approach.

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