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A Comparison of Statistical Methods to Construct Confidence Intervals and Fiducial Intervals for Measures of Health Disparities

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  • Tengfei Li

    (Department of Biostatistics, Bioinformatics and Biomathematics, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057, USA)

  • Anca D. Dragomir

    (Department of Oncology, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057, USA)

  • George Luta

    (Department of Biostatistics, Bioinformatics and Biomathematics, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057, USA)

Abstract

Health disparities are differences in health status across different socioeconomic groups. Classical methods, e.g., the Delta method, have been used to estimate the standard errors of estimated measures of health disparities and to construct confidence intervals for these measures. However, the confidence intervals constructed using the classical methods do not have good coverage properties for situations involving sparse data. In this article, we introduce three new methods to construct fiducial intervals for measures of health disparities based on approximate fiducial quantities. Through a comprehensive simulation study, We compare the empirical coverage properties of the proposed fiducial intervals against two Monte Carlo simulation-based methods—utilizing either a truncated Normal distribution or the Gamma distribution—as well as the classical method. The findings of the simulation study advocate for the adoption of the Monte Carlo simulation-based method with the Gamma distribution when a unified approach is sought for all health disparity measures.

Suggested Citation

  • Tengfei Li & Anca D. Dragomir & George Luta, 2024. "A Comparison of Statistical Methods to Construct Confidence Intervals and Fiducial Intervals for Measures of Health Disparities," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 21(2), pages 1-17, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:21:y:2024:i:2:p:208-:d:1336976
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Breen, N. & Scott, S. & Percy-Laurry, A. & Lewis, D. & Glasgow, R., 2014. "Health disparities calculator: A methodologically rigorous tool for analyzing inequalities in population health," American Journal of Public Health, American Public Health Association, vol. 104(9), pages 1589-1591.
    2. Jaeil Ahn & Sam Harper & Mandi Yu & Eric J Feuer & Benmei Liu, 2019. "Improved Monte Carlo methods for estimating confidence intervals for eleven commonly used health disparity measures," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(7), pages 1-8, July.
    3. Kakwani, Nanak & Wagstaff, Adam & van Doorslaer, Eddy, 1997. "Socioeconomic inequalities in health: Measurement, computation, and statistical inference," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 77(1), pages 87-103, March.
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