Comparison of Two Frameworks for Analyzing Longitudinal Data

Under the random design of longitudinal data, observation times are irregular, and there are mainly two frameworks for analyzing such kind of longitudinal data. One is the clustered data framework and the other is the counting process framework. In this paper, we give a thorough comparison of these two frameworks in terms of data structure, model assumptions and estimation procedures. We find that modeling the observation times in the counting process framework will not gain any efficiency when the observation times are correlated with covariates but independent of the longitudinal response given covariates. Some simulation studies are conducted to compare the finite sample behaviors of the related estimators, and a real data analysis of the Alzheimer's disease study is implemented for further comparison.