Accommodating informative visit times for analysing irregular longitudinal data: a sensitivity analysis approach with balancing weights estimators

Abstract Irregular longitudinal data with informative visit times arise when patients’ visits are partly driven by concurrent disease outcomes. However, existing methods such as inverse intensity weighting (IIW), often overlook or have not adequately assessed the influence of informative visit times on estimation and inference. Based on novel balancing weights estimators, we propose a new sensitivity analysis approach to addressing informative visit times within the IIW framework. The balancing weights are obtained by balancing observed history variable distributions over time and including a selection function with specified sensitivity parameters to characterize the additional influence of the concurrent outcome on the visit process. A calibration procedure is proposed to anchor the range of the sensitivity parameters to the amount of variation in the visit process that could be additionally explained by the concurrent outcome given the observed history and time. Simulations demonstrate that our balancing weights estimators outperform existing weighted estimators for robustness and efficiency. We provide an R Markdown tutorial of the proposed methods and apply them to analyse data from a clinic-based cohort of psoriatic arthritis.