The Impact of Nonrandom Missingness in Surveillance Data for Population-Level Summaries: Simulation Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Surveillance data are essential public health resources for guiding policy and allocation of human and capital resources. These data often consist of large collections of information based on nonrandom sample designs. Population estimates based on such data may be impacted by the underlying sample distribution compared to the true population of interest. In this study, we simulate a population of interest and allow response rates to vary in nonrandom ways to illustrate and measure the effect this has on population-based estimates of an important public health policy outcome. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to illustrate the effect of nonrandom missingness on population-based survey sample estimation. METHODS: We simulated a population of respondents answering a survey question about their satisfaction with their community's policy regarding vaccination mandates for government personnel. We allowed response rates to differ between the generally satisfied and dissatisfied and considered the effect of common efforts to control for potential bias such as sampling weights, sample size inflation, and hypothesis tests for determining missingness at random. We compared these conditions via mean squared errors and sampling variability to characterize the bias in estimation arising under these different approaches. RESULTS: Sample estimates present clear and quantifiable bias, even in the most favorable response profile. On a 5-point Likert scale, nonrandom missingness resulted in errors averaging to almost a full point away from the truth. Efforts to mitigate bias through sample size inflation and sampling weights have negligible effects on the overall results. Additionally, hypothesis testing for departures from random missingness rarely detect the nonrandom missingness across the widest range of response profiles considered. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that assuming surveillance data are missing at random during analysis could provide estimates that are widely different from what we might see in the whole population. Policy decisions based on such potentially biased estimates could be devastating in terms of community disengagement and health disparities. Alternative approaches to analysis that move away from broad generalization of a mismeasured population at risk are necessary to identify the marginalized groups, where overall response may be very different from those observed in measured respondents.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.089 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".