Yingjie Weng, Lu Tian, Derek Boothroyd, Justin Lee, Kenny Zhang, Di Lu, Christina P Lindan, Jenna Bollyky, Beatrice Huang, George W Rutherford, Yvonne Maldonado, Manisha Desai
Understanding the incidence of disease is often crucial for public policy decision-making, as observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Estimating incidence is challenging, however, when the definition of incidence relies on tests that imperfectly measure disease, as in the case when assays with variable performance are used to detect the SARS-CoV-2 virus. To our knowledge there are no pragmatic methods to address the bias introduced by performance of labs in testing for the virus. In the setting of a longitudinal study, we developed a maximum likelihood estimation (MLE)-based approach to estimate laboratory performance-adjusted incidence using the expectation-maximization algorithm...
March 7, 2024: Epidemiology