title: A direct approach for correcting AIDS incidence: variance formula and comparison with other methods.
abstract: We present a direct approach for correcting the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) incidence data for reporting delays, based on a non-parametric method for the analysis of right truncated data. We show that the proposed method when applied for grouped data is equivalent to three other published methods. We give a simple formula for the variance of the estimated AIDS incidence. Both estimator and variance are assessed in a simulation study. It is important for the estimation of AIDS incidence in the last quarter of the period under consideration to use month rather than quarter or half-year as the time unit for the analyses. The method is illustrated using data from the United States Centers for Disease Control.
authors.affiliation: INSERM U.330, Université de Bordeaux II, France.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Alioum
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Commenges
mesh_terms: D000163:Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000453:epidemiology*; D000465:Algorithms; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D006801:Humans; D015994:Incidence; D016013:Likelihood Functions; D015233:Models, Statistical; D013997:Time Factors; D014481:United States / Q000453:epidemiology