Testing the common risk difference of proportions for stratified uni‐ and bilateral correlated data

Abstract

In medical clinical studies, uni‐ and bilateral data naturally occurs if each patient contributes either one or both of paired organ measurements in a stratified design. This paper mainly proposes a common test of risk differences between proportions for stratified uni‐ and bilateral correlated data. Likelihood ratio, score, and Wald‐type test statistics are constructed using global, unconstrained, and constrained maximum likelihood estimations of parameters. Simulation studies are conducted to evaluate the performance of these test procedures in terms of type I error rates and powers. Empirical results show that the likelihood ratio test is more robust and powerful than other statistics. A real example is used to illustrate the proposed methods.