st: Re: statistical test and sensitivity analysis for matched pairs with censoring

["Joseph Coveney" <jcoveney@bigplanet.com>]

Shoryoku Hino wrote:

I am using Stata11 and working on the observational data.
I produced the one-to-one matched pairs using PSMATCH2 to compare the
treatment A with B in terms of maintenance effect.
The primary outcome is the time to recurrence of the disease.
There are two questions I would like to ask you.
1) What is the appropriate statistical test in this situation? RF.Woolson
seems to recommend censored-data version of signed rank test. But I have no
idea how we can do it on Stata. 
2) How to perform sensitivity analysis to determine the magnitude of hidden
bias in this case?

I wonder if you could help me to know the way to operate Stata for these
purpose.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1) Help files for Stata's official survival time commands can be seen by typing

    help st

at the command line.  Stat has a selection of tests for censored survival time
data.  The help file for these tests can be seen by typing

    help sts_test

at the command line.  I don't know whether the particular one you mention is
among the ones that Stata offers.  

Stata also has modeling commands for this type of data.  You can click on the 
hyperlinks in the viewer window that displays after typing "help st" to see 
more about these modeling commands.

There are also user-written commands for survival time or censored data.  You
can see more about these by typing

    findit survival

and

    findit censored

at the command line, and then clicking on the hyperlinks that appear in the 
viewer window that pops up.

2) I don't understand your question and so can't offer a specific answer to it,
but in general you can use Monte Carlo simulation in order to explore the 
properties of a method.  To see Stata's help file for Monte Carlo simulation,
type

    help simulate

at the command line.

Joseph Coveney


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