Abstract
This paper considers the shrinkage estimation of multilevel models that are appropriate for ordinal longitudinal data. These models can accommodate multiple random effects and, additionally, allow for a general form of model covariates that are related to the overall level of the responses and changes to the response over time. The likelihood inference for multilevel models is computationally burdensome due to intractable integrals. A maximum marginal likelihood (MML) method with Fisher’s scoring procedure is therefore followed to estimate the random and fixed effects parameters. In real life data, researchers may have collected many covariates for the response. Some of these covariates may satisfy certain constraints which can be used to produce a restricted estimate from the unrestricted likelihood function. The unrestricted and restricted MMLs can then be combined optimally to form the pretest and shrinkage estimators. Asymptotic properties of these estimators including biases and risks will be discussed. A simulation study is conducted to assess the performance of the estimators with respect to the unrestricted MML estimator. Finally, the relevance of the proposed estimators will be illustrated with a real data set.
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Acknowledgements
The OAI is a public–private partnership comprising five contracts (N01-AR-2-2258; N01-AR-2-2259; N01-AR-2-2260; N01-AR-2-2261; N01-AR-2-2262) funded by the National Institutes of Health, a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services, and conducted by the OAI Study Investigators. Private funding partners include Merck Research Laboratories; Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation; GlaxoSmithKline; and Pfizer, Inc. Private sector funding for the OAI is managed by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health. This manuscript was prepared using an OAI public use data set and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or views of the OAI investigators, the NIH, or the private funding partners. We express our sincere thanks to the editor, associate editor, and the referees for their constructive and valuable suggestions, which led to an improvement of our original version of the manuscript. Shakhawat Hossain and Saumen Mandal were supported by Discovery Grants from the Natural Sciences and the Engineering Research Council of Canada.
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Appendix
Appendix
Proof of transforming the prior distribution in (6) of Sect. 3:
Applying the transformation \(\varvec{u} = \varvec{G\psi } + \varvec{\mu },\) where \(\varvec{GG^{\mathsf {T}}}\) = \(\varvec{\Sigma _U}\) and \(D_{ij}\) = \(\varvec{X}_{ij}^{\mathsf {T}} \varvec{\beta } + \varvec{Z}_{ij}^{\mathsf {T}} (\varvec{G\psi } + \varvec{\mu})\):
Thus, denoting \(h(\varvec{\psi })\) as the multivariate standard normal distribution completes the proof.
Proof of equation (7): We begin by writing the full likelihood for the response as:
Taking logs of both sides yields and setting \(f(\varvec{Y}_i) =\int _{\varvec{\psi }}\ell (\varvec{Y}_{i}|\varvec{\beta },\varvec{\psi }) h(\varvec{\psi })d\varvec{\psi }\),
Now, taking the partial derivative with respect to the parameters, we have:
where
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Hossain, S., Hiebert, I. & Mandal, S. Estimation strategy of multilevel model for ordinal longitudinal data. Jpn J Stat Data Sci 2, 299–322 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42081-019-00035-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42081-019-00035-1