statistics - I am wondering if the statistical analysis I did makes any sense

Question

I am helping with a retrospective study and the data isn't very well organized. Also, I am new to statistics, so I took a stab at analyzing the data myself. We will be getting the help of a statistician later on, but not sure when yet.

We are looking at about 100 patients and each patient was followed up with for a variable amount of time. Throughout each patient's follow-up, there were a variable amount of observations made at various timepoints. The observations included a set of lab values, anthropometric data, and demographic data. So to conduct the analysis, we split up the observations into time bins (eg. 6 months follow-up, 1 year follow up, etc). Then for each time point, we categorized each patient in one of 3 groups based on the outcome of interest. Also, for each time point, we selected one observation to represent one patient during that timepoint (since there could be many within the same time bin). For the analysis, we did the following:

1 . ANOVA within each timepoint to compare the 3 groups of outcomes . Looking at select independent variables of interest.

2 . For the same variables of interest above, do a repeated measures ANOVA to see if it's changing over time.

3 . Test for correlations between the variables of interest mentioned above and other independent variables.

4 . Test each independent variable in a univariate binomial logistic regression to see if it predicts outcome. There were 3 groups, so we did pairwise regressions (eg. (outcome 1 + 2) vs (outcome 3), and (outcome 1) vs (outcome 2 + 3)).

5 . Do a multivariate binomial logistic regression with forward elimination using only the significant independent variables retained from step 4.

6 . If any independent variables of interest are retained in the MV regression, run it again testing for potential interactions with any variables it was correlated with from step 3. We tried to do this by making a new variable that is the product of the two variables and putting it into the regression.

What I'm trying to show with this analysis is that one key independent variable explains the difference in outcomes among the patients. So far my analysis seems to be doing this, as it seems to be one of the few variables retained at step 6 and with a good significance value. So sorry if this is very confusing to read.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66057612/i-am-wondering-if-the-statistical-analysis-i-did-makes-any-sense

Answer 1

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