The short answer is Yes, many of them.
A longer answer is more difficult to do well
given such little information.
We have just had a thread on an overlapping
question. Look for "outliners" [sic] in
the archives.
You don't quite say so, but these sound like
panel data. For concreteness, I guess 500
patients and 10 observations on each, one
for each year. My guesses have some
influence on my suggestions.
What is an outlier in this context? Presumably
a patient who differs from many others; or
an observation that differs from the rest
of the patient's history. Both could make
sense, e.g. in the case of anorexic/bulimic
patients, or patients who had a really bad
year, say a fight with cancer or being
caught up in "Lost".
First off, if a patient's height varies more than
trivially over 10 years, either there is something
going on, say growth for young people or some aging
effect, or there is a error in the data.
Weight fluctuations would seem rather different
and everyone knows reasons for various kinds
of weight change even in adulthood. It would
seem a bit more difficult to pick up
on errors (meaning mistakes).
There are lots of things you can do. You
could set up a loop to plot the time series
for each patient. For 500 patients that would
be a little tedious, but it is a direct
approach.
You could try reductions, e.g.
last height - first height
last weight - first weight
mean height over period
mean weight over period
some measure of variability of each
and look for outliers on pairwise plots
of each. A scatterplot matrix often
shows errors even in data that have
supposedly been cleaned. Often
the cleaning is univariate, but a
weird data value can show up like
a run in fabric.
My prejudice is that no testing or
measuring approach beats graphics
for finding outliers.
Nick
[email protected]
Raphael Fraser
I have 10 years data (5000 observations) on patients heights and
weights. Is there any ado-file that could assist in locating possible
outliers?
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