Cost-Effective Extreme Case-Control Design Using a Resampling Method.

Abstract

Nested case-control sampling design is a popular method in a cohort study whose events are often rare. The controls are randomly selected with or without the matching variable fully observed across all cohort samples to control confounding factors. In this article, we propose a new nested case-control sampling design incorporating both extreme case-control design and a resampling technique. This new algorithm has two main advantages with respect to the conventional nested case-control design. First, it inherits the strength of extreme case-control design such that it does not require the risk sets in each event time to be specified. Second, the target number of controls can only be determined by the budget and time constraints and the resampling method allows an under sampling design, which means that the total number of sampled controls can be smaller than the number of cases. A simulation study demonstrated that the proposed algorithm performs well even when we have a smaller number of controls compared with the number of cases. The proposed sampling algorithm is applied to a public data collected for “Thorotrast Study.”