title: Comparisons of the performance of different statistical tests for time-to-event analysis with confounding factors: practical illustrations in kidney transplantation.
abstract: Confounding factors are commonly encountered in observational studies. Several confounder-adjusted tests to compare survival between differently exposed subjects were proposed. However, only few studies have compared their performances regarding type I error rates, and no study exists evaluating their type II error rates. In this paper, we performed a comparative simulation study based on two different applications in kidney transplantation research. Our results showed that the propensity score-based inverse probability weighting (IPW) log-rank test proposed by Xie and Liu (2005) can be recommended as a first descriptive approach as it provides adjusted survival curves and has acceptable type I and II error rates. Even better performance was observed for the Wald test of the parameter corresponding to the exposure variable in a multivariable-adjusted Cox model. This last result is of primary interest regarding the exponentially increasing use of propensity score-based methods in the literature.
authors.affiliation: SPHERE (EA 4275): bioStatistics, Pharmacoepidemiology & Human sciEnces REsearch, University of Nantes, Nantes, France.|IDBC/A2com, Espace Antrium Parc de la Teillais, 35740 PACE, France.|Transplantation, Urology and Nephrology Institute (ITUN), Nantes Hospital and University, Nantes, INSERM U1064, France.
authors.forename: Florent
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Le Borgne
authors.affiliation: Centre de recherche Epidémiologie et Biostatistique, INSERM U1153, Paris, France.|Centre d'Investigation clinique INSERM, Tours, CIC 1415, France.|Université François Rabelais de Tours, PRES Centre-Val de Loire Université, Tours, France.|CHRU de Tours, Tours, France.
authors.forename: Bruno
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Giraudeau
authors.affiliation: SPHERE (EA 4275): bioStatistics, Pharmacoepidemiology & Human sciEnces REsearch, University of Nantes, Nantes, France.|Transplantation, Urology and Nephrology Institute (ITUN), Nantes Hospital and University, Nantes, INSERM U1064, France.|Médecine néphrologie - Hémodialyse, Centre Hospitalier Départemental Vendée Site de La Roche sur Yon, France.
authors.forename: Anne Héléne
authors.initials: AH
authors.lastname: Querard
authors.affiliation: Transplantation, Urology and Nephrology Institute (ITUN), Nantes Hospital and University, Nantes, INSERM U1064, France.
authors.forename: Magali
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Giral
authors.affiliation: SPHERE (EA 4275): bioStatistics, Pharmacoepidemiology & Human sciEnces REsearch, University of Nantes, Nantes, France.|Transplantation, Urology and Nephrology Institute (ITUN), Nantes Hospital and University, Nantes, INSERM U1064, France.
authors.forename: Yohann
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0330-7457
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Foucher
mesh_terms: D056808:Biostatistics; D003198:Computer Simulation; D015986:Confounding Factors, Epidemiologic; D006801:Humans; D016030:Kidney Transplantation / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D015233:Models, Statistical; D057216:Propensity Score; D016016:Proportional Hazards Models; D013997:Time Factors; D014019:Tissue Donors / Q000706:statistics & numerical data
keywords: adjusted Kaplan-Meier estimator; adjusted log-rank test; inverse probability weighting; propensity score; simulation study; survival data