Regression analysis of longitudinal data with mixed synchronous and asynchronous longitudinal covariates

Abstract

In linear models, omitting a covariate that is orthogonal to covariates in the model does not result in biased coefficient estimation. This generally does not hold for longitudinal data, where additional assumptions are needed to get an unbiased coefficient estimation in addition to the orthogonality between omitted longitudinal covariates and longitudinal covariates in the model. We propose methods to mitigate the omitted variable bias under weaker assumptions. A two-step estimation procedure is proposed to infer the asynchronous longitudinal covariates when such covariates are observed. For mixed synchronous and asynchronous longitudinal covariates, we get a parametric convergence rate for the coefficient estimation of the synchronous longitudinal covariates by the two-step method. Extensive simulation studies provide numerical support for the theoretical findings. We illustrate the performance of our method on a dataset from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative study.