Sex, lies and self-reported counts: Bayesian mixture models for heaping in longitudinal count data via birth-death processes

DOI10.1214/15-AOAS809zbMATH Open1397.62447arXiv1405.4265WikidataQ31010907 ScholiaQ31010907MaRDI QIDQ746645FDOQ746645

Authors: Forrest W. Crawford, Robert E. Weiss, Marc A. Suchard 

Publication date: 28 October 2015

Published in: The Annals of Applied Statistics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Surveys often ask respondents to report nonnegative counts, but respondents may misremember or round to a nearby multiple of 5 or 10. This phenomenon is called heaping, and the error inherent in heaped self-reported numbers can bias estimation. Heaped data may be collected cross-sectionally or longitudinally and there may be covariates that complicate the inferential task. Heaping is a well-known issue in many survey settings, and inference for heaped data is an important statistical problem. We propose a novel reporting distribution whose underlying parameters are readily interpretable as rates of misremembering and rounding. The process accommodates a variety of heaping grids and allows for quasi-heaping to values nearly but not equal to heaping multiples. We present a Bayesian hierarchical model for longitudinal samples with covariates to infer both the unobserved true distribution of counts and the parameters that control the heaping process. Finally, we apply our methods to longitudinal self-reported counts of sex partners in a study of high-risk behavior in HIV-positive youth.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.4265

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zbMATH Keywords

continuous-time Markov chainmixture modelBayesian hierarchical modelroundingcoarse dataheaping

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Classification and discrimination; cluster analysis (statistical aspects) (62H30) Applications of statistics to biology and medical sciences; meta analysis (62P10) Branching processes (Galton-Watson, birth-and-death, etc.) (60J80)

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Cited In (7)

• Birth/birth-death processes and their computable transition probabilities with biological applications
• Integer percentages as electoral falsification fingerprints
• Computational methods for birth-death processes
• Sex, lies and self-reported counts: Bayesian mixture models for heaping in longitudinal count data via birth-death processes
• A statistical approach to address the problem of heaping in self-reported income data
• Measures and tests of heaping in discrete quantitative distributions
• A method of correction for heaping error in the variables using validation data

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