Estimation of the retransformed conditional mean in health care cost studies

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Wang, Huixia Judy; Zhou, Xiao-Hua
• 署名单位: North Carolina State University; US Department of Veterans Affairs; Veterans Health Administration (VHA); Vet Affairs Puget Sound Health Care System
• 刊物名称: BIOMETRIKA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0006-3444
• DOI: 10.1093/biomet/asp072
• 发表日期: 2010
• 页码: 147158
• 关键词: risk adjustment; regression; ado

摘要

We propose a new approach for analyzing skewed and heteroscedastic health care cost data through regression of the conditional quantiles of the transformed cost. Using the appealing equivariance property of quantiles to monotone transformations, we propose a distribution-free estimator of the conditional mean cost on the original scale. The proposed method is extended to a two-part heteroscedastic model to account for zero costs commonly seen in health care cost studies. Simulation studies indicate that the proposed estimator has competitive and more robust performance than existing estimators in various heteroscedastic models.