Asymmetric regression models with limited responses with an application to antibody response to vaccine

Abstract

We develop regression models for limited and censored data based on the mixture between the log-power-normal and Bernoulli-type distributions. A likelihood-based approach is implemented for parameter estimation and a small-scale simulation study is conducted to evaluate parameter recovery, with emphasis on bias estimation. The main conclusion is that the approach is very much satisfactory for moderate and large sample sizes. A real data example, the safety and immunogenecity study of measles vaccine in Haiti, is presented to illustrate how different models can be used to fit this type of data. As shown, the asymmetric models considered seem to present the best fit for the data set under study, revealing significance of the explanatory variable sex, which is not found significant with the log-normal model.