Homogeneity Test of Many-to-One Relative Risk Ratios in Unilateral and Bilateral Data with Multiple Groups

Abstract

In medical clinical studies, we often encounter paired organs’ unilateral or bilateral data. For bilateral data, there exists an intraclass correlation between paired organs. Under an intraclass correlation model, this paper proposes asymptotic statistics for testing the equality of many-to-one relative risk ratios in combined unilateral and bilateral data. Furthermore, we calculate the explicit expressions of these statistics. Moreover, these procedures are adequate to solve the hypothesis problems of unilateral or bilateral data. Through comparison, the simulation results show that the score test has a robust empirical type-I error rate and sufficient power. We provide a clinical trial of acute otitis media to illustrate our proposed methods.