Biostatistics Commons^™

Robust Inference For The Stepped Wedge Design, James P. Hughes, Patrick J. Heagerty, Fan Xia, Yuqi Ren

UW Biostatistics Working Paper Series

Based on a permutation argument, we derive a closed form expression for an estimate of the treatment effect, along with its standard error, in a stepped wedge design. We show that these estimates are robust to misspecification of both the mean and covariance structure of the underlying data-generating mechanism, thereby providing a robust approach to inference for the treatment effect in stepped wedge designs. We use simulations to evaluate the type I error and power of the proposed estimate and to compare the performance of the proposed estimate to the optimal estimate when the correct model specification is known. The …