Overcoming the simplification strategy

Analyzing binary or continuous data usually doesn’t cause any headaches for statisticians. But when we step into ordinal data, most of us ignore their specific nature and either dichotomize them or analyze them as if they are continuous.

Recently, these problems have become much more prevalent due to the nature of composite endpoints (watch out for an interesting episode on this in a few weeks).

Now Benjamin and I have worked on better tools to analyze such data already at the university. We’ll dig back into what we learned then and what is still relevant today.

Specifically, we’ll cover the following questions:

  • What are ordinal data?
  • How do we commonly analyze ordinal data and what’s wrong with these approaches?
  • What are better ways to analyze ordinal data?
  • How can we present ordinal data best using graphics?
References:

A New Nonparametric Approach for Baseline Covariate Adjustment for Two‐Group Comparative Studies

Van Elteren test for nonparametric two-way analysis

Nonparametric Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Factorial Experiments (Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics)

Find many more references for non-parametric approaches here!

Join The Effective Statistician LinkedIn group

I want to help the community of statisticians, data scientists, programmers and other quantitative scientists to be more influential, innovative, and effective. I believe that as a community we can help our research, our regulatory and payer systems, and ultimately physicians and patients take better decisions based on better evidence.

I work to achieve a future in which everyone can access the right evidence in the right format at the right time to make sound decisions.

When my kids are sick, I want to have good evidence to discuss with the physician about the different therapy choices.

When my mother is sick, I want her to understand the evidence and being able to understand it.

When I get sick, I want to find evidence that I can trust and that helps me to have meaningful discussions with my healthcare professionals.

I want to live in a world, where the media reports correctly about medical evidence and in which society distinguishes between fake evidence and real evidence.

Let’s work together to achieve this.