Ariel Linden & Paul R. Yarnold
Linden Consulting Group, LLC & Optimal Data Analysis, LLC
In a recent series of papers, ODA has been applied to observational data to draw causal inferences about treatment effects. In this article ODA is applied to data from a randomized controlled trial, with a reanalysis of a study by Linden and Butterworth [2014] that investigated the effect of a comprehensive hospital-based intervention in reducing readmissions for chronically ill patients. In the original analysis, negative binomial regression was used to evaluate readmission rates and emergency department visit rates at 30 and 90 days, and no treatment effects were found. However, ODA is a superior analytic approach because of its insensitivity to skewed data, model-free permutation tests to derive P values, identification of the threshold value which best discriminates intervention and control groups, use of a chance- and complexity-corrected indexes of classification accuracy, and cross-validation to assess generalizability of the findings.
odajournal.com 