Generating binary data by specifying the relative risk, with simulations

Posted on July 2, 2024

The most traditional approach for analyzing binary outcome data is logistic regression, where the estimated parameters are interpreted as log odds ratios or, if exponentiated, as odds ratios (ORs). No one other than statisticians (and maybe not even statisticians) finds the odds ratio to be a very intuitive statistic, and many feel that a risk difference or risk ratio/relative risks (RRs) are much more interpretable. Indeed, there seems to be a strong belief that readers will, more often than not, interpret odds ratios as risk ratios. [Read More]
R  simulation  logistic regression  poisson regression  simstudy 

simstudy: another way to generate data from a non-standard density

Posted on June 4, 2024

One of my goals for the simstudy package is to make it as easy as possible to generate data from a wide range of data distributions. The recent update created the possibility of generating data from a customized distribution specified in a user-defined function. Last week, I added two functions, genDataDist and addDataDist, that allow data generation from an empirical distribution defined by a vector of integers. (See here for how to download latest development version. [Read More]
R  simstudy 

simstudy 0.8.0: customized distributions

Posted on May 21, 2024

Over the past few years, a number of folks have asked if simstudy accommodates customized distributions. There’s been interest in truncated, zero-inflated, or even more standard distributions that haven’t been implemented in simstudy. While I’ve come up with approaches for some of the specific cases, I was never able to develop a general solution that could provide broader flexibility. This shortcoming changes with the latest version of simstudy, now available on CRAN. [Read More]
R  simstudy 

Finding logistic models to generate data with desired risk ratio, risk difference and AUC profiles

Posted on June 20, 2023

About two years ago, someone inquired whether simstudy had the functionality to generate data from a logistic model with a specific AUC. It did not, but now it does, thanks to a paper by Peter Austin that describes a nice algorithm to accomplish this. The paper actually describes a series of related algorithms for generating coefficients that target specific prevalence rates, risk ratios, and risk differences, in addition the AUC. [Read More]
R  simstudy  logistic regression 

simstudy 0.6.0 released: more flexible correlation patterns

Posted on February 21, 2023

The new version (0.6.0) of simstudy is available for download from CRAN. In addition to some important bug fixes, I’ve added new functionality that should make data generation with correlated data a little more flexible. In the previous post, I described enhancements to the function genCorMat. As part of this release announcement, I’m describing blockExchangeMat and blockDecayMat, two new functions that can be used to generate correlation matrices when there is a temporal element to the data generation. [Read More]
R  simstudy  correlated data 

Flexible correlation generation: an update to genCorMat in simstudy

Posted on February 14, 2023

I’ve been slowly working on some updates to simstudy, focusing mostly on the functionality to generate correlation matrices (which can be used to simulate correlated data). Here, I’m briefly describing the function genCorMat, which has been updated to facilitate the generation of correlation matrices for clusters of different sizes and with potentially different correlation coefficients. I’ll briefly describe what the existing function can currently do, and then give an idea about what the enhancements will provide. [Read More]
R  simstudy  correlated data 

simstudy updated to version 0.5.0

Posted on July 20, 2022

A new version of simstudy is available on CRAN. There are two major enhancements and several new features. In the “major” category, I would include (1) changes to survival data generation that accommodate hazard ratios that can change over time, as well as competing risks, and (2) the addition of functions to allow users to sample from existing data sets with replacement to generate “synthetic” data will real life distribution properties. [Read More]
R  simstudy  simulation 

simstudy update: ordinal data generation that violates proportionality

Posted on January 25, 2022

Version 0.4.0 of simstudy is now available on CRAN and GitHub. This update includes two enhancements (and at least one major bug fix). genOrdCat now includes an argument to generate ordinal data without an assumption of cumulative proportional odds. And two new functions defRepeat and defRepeatAdd make it a bit easier to define multiple variables that share the same distribution assumptions. Ordinal data In simstudy, it is relatively easy to specify multinomial distributions that characterize categorical data. [Read More]
R  simstudy 

simstudy update: adding flexibility to data generation

Posted on November 9, 2021

A new version of simstudy (0.3.0) is now available on CRAN and on the package website. Along with some less exciting bug fixes, we have added capabilities to a few existing features: double-dot variable reference, treatment assignment, and categorical data definition. These simple additions should make the data generation process a little smoother and more flexible. Using non-scalar double-dot variable reference Double-dot notation was introduced in the last version of simstudy to allow data definitions to be more dynamic. [Read More]
R  simstudy