Fillin: Fill-in or Substitution Methods

In marlod: Marginal Modeling for Exposure Data with Values Below the LOD

Fill-in or Substitution Methods

Description

Uses substitution methods, including single and multiple value imputation techniques, such that any measurements less than the limit of detection (LOD).

Usage

Fillin(y, lod, n, tp, substitue)

Arguments

y	A list of numeric values or a vector of the observed values.
lod	A numeric value of limit of detection (LOD).
n	A numeric value of number of subjects.
tp	A numeric value of number of time points or repeated measurements.
substitue	A character string specifying the substitution approach, including "None", "LOD", "LOD2", "LODS2", "BetaMean", "BetaGM", "QQplot", "MIWithID", and "MIWithIDRM".

Details

Single value imputation techniques, such as LOD/2 or LOD/\sqrt2 ("LOD2" or "LODS2") (Hornung and Reed, 1990; Burstyn and Teschke, 1999), and \beta-substitution method ("BetaMean" and "BetaGM") (Ganser and Hewett, 2010), are used to assign a value to a range between 0 and the LOD. "QQplot" represents the multiple order value imputation technique that depicts the natural logarithm of the uncensored or detected observed values versus the Z-scores and fits a linear regression presented in a quantile-quantile (QQ) plot (Pleil, 2016).For a multiple random value imputation technique, the imputed values can be generated using a regression of an exposure measurement on covariate(s) ("MIWithID" and "MIWithIDRM") (Lubin et al., 2004). Note that the function "impute.boot" and its corresponding functions used to apply the multiple random value imputation are from the package "miWQS" (version 0.4.4). Please cite "miWQS" when publishing results using "MIWithID" or "MIWithIDRM".

Value

A list of numeric values or a vector with imputed values that are assigned to non-detects.

Author(s)

I-Chen Chen

References

Burstyn, I., Teschke, K. (1999). Studying the determinants of exposure: a review of methods. American Industrial Hygiene Association Journal, 60, 57–72.

Ganser, G. H., Hewett, P. (2010). An accurate substitution method for analyzing censored data. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene, 7, 233–44.

Hornung, R. W., Reed, L. D. (1990). Estimation of average concentration in the presence of nondetectable values. Applied Occupational and Environmental Hygiene, 5, 46–51.

Lubin, J. H., Colt, J. S., Camann, D., et al. (2004). Epidemiologic evaluation of measurement data in the presence of detection limits. Environmental Health Perspectives, 112, 1691–6.

Pleil, J. D. (2016). QQ-plots for assessing distributions of biomarker measurements and generating defensible summary statistics. Journal of Breath Research, 10, 035001.

Examples

## Uses an example from Ganser and Hewett (2010).
library(marlod)

y <- c(0,0,0,3.06,4.41,7.23,8.29,9.52,19.94,20.25) #LOD=3
lod <- 3

Fillin(y, lod, n, tp, "None")

Fillin(y, lod, n, tp, "LOD")

Fillin(y, lod, n, tp, "LOD2")

Fillin(y, lod, n, tp, "LODS2")

Fillin(y, lod, n, tp, "BetaMean")

Fillin(y, lod, n, tp, "BetaGM")

Fillin(y, lod, n, tp, "QQplot")

## Assumes this example is a longitudinal dataset with five subjects measured at two time points.
## Number of subjects (n) and number of time points (tp) are required.

n <- 5
tp <- 2

#Multiple imputation method with one covariate using id (order of subjects)
Fillin(y, lod, n, tp, "MIWithID")

marlod documentation built on June 8, 2025, 10:32 a.m.