Lectures and seminars SfoEpi Seminar Series in Biostatistics: Dr George Luta

Speaker : George Luta, Ph.D., Department of Biostatistics, Bioinformatics and Biomathematics, Georgetown University Medical Center. Dr. Luta joined Georgetown University in 2007, after being a faculty in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Timisoara, a biostatistician at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Statistical Sciences. His current honorary appointments include being a Visiting Professor in the Department of Clinical Epidemiology at Aarhus University (Aarhus, Denmark) and a Visiting Professor at The Parker Institute (Copenhagen University Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark). Dr. Luta is an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute.

Title: Statistical Methods for the Construction of Confidence Intervals for Measures of Health Disparities

Abstract: Health disparities are differences in health status across socioeconomic groups. Analytic methods, such as the Taylor series approximation method, are commonly 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 these methods do not have good coverage properties for situations involving sparse data. In this presentation we describe a new method for the construction of confidence intervals for measures of health disparities based on approximate fiducial quantities. We use a simulation study to compare the coverage properties of the 95% confidence intervals constructed using the two types of methods. Based on the results of the simulation study, we recommend the use of the new method for the construction of confidence intervals for measures of health disparities.

Contact: If you any questions please contact Matteo Bottai