Some factors affecting statistical power of approximate tests in the linear mixed model for longitudinal data


BAHÇECİTAPAR M.

COMMUNICATIONS IN STATISTICS-SIMULATION AND COMPUTATION, cilt.47, sa.1, ss.294-314, 2018 (SCI-Expanded) identifier identifier

Özet

Different longitudinal study designs require different statistical analysis methods and different methods of sample size determination. Statistical power analysis is a flexible approach to sample size determination for longitudinal studies. However, different power analyses are required for different statistical tests which arises from the difference between different statistical methods. In this paper, the simulation-based power calculations of F-tests with Containment, Kenward-Roger or Satterth-waite approximation of degrees of freedom are examined for sample size determination in the context of a special case of linear mixed models (LMMs), which is frequently used in the analysis of longitudinal data. Essentially, the roles of some factors, such as variance-covariance structure of random effects [unstructured UN or factor analytic FA0], autocorrelation structure among errors over time [independent IND, first-order autoregressive AR1 or first-order moving average MA1], parameter estimation methods [maximum likelihood ML and restricted maximum likelihood REML] and iterative algorithms [ridge-stabilized Newton-Raphson and Quasi-Newton] on statistical power of approximate F-tests in the LMM are examined together, which has not been considered previously. The greatest factor affecting statistical power is found to be the variance-covariance structure of random effects in the LMM. It appears that the simulation-based analysis in this study gives an interesting insight into statistical power of approximate F-tests for fixed effects in LMMs for longitudinal data.