Privacy-protecting estimation of adjusted risk ratios using modified Poisson regression in multi-center studies

Privacy-protecting estimation of adjusted risk ratios using modified Poisson regression in multi-center studies

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Abstract Background Multi-center studies can generate robust and generalizable evidence, but privacy considerations and legal restrictions often make it challenging or impossible to pool individual-level data across data-contributing sites.With binary outcomes, privacy-protecting distributed algorithms to conduct logistic regression analyses have been developed.However, the risk ratio often provides a more transparent interpretation of the exposure-outcome association than the odds ratio.

Modified Poisson regression has been proposed to directly estimate adjusted risk ratios and produce confidence intervals with the correct nominal coverage when individual-level 1073spx data are available.There are currently no distributed regression algorithms to estimate adjusted risk ratios while avoiding pooling of individual-level data in multi-center studies.Methods By leveraging the Newton-Raphson procedure, we adapted the modified Poisson regression method to estimate multivariable-adjusted risk ratios using only summary-level information in multi-center studies.

We developed and tested the proposed method using both simulated and real-world data examples.We compared its results with the results from the corresponding pooled individual-level data analysis.Results Our proposed method produced the same adjusted risk ratio estimates and standard errors as the corresponding pooled individual-level data analysis without pooling individual-level data across data-contributing sites.

Conclusions We developed and validated a distributed modified Poisson regression algorithm for valid and privacy-protecting estimation of adjusted risk ratios and confidence intervals in multi-center studies.This method allows computation of a more interpretable measure of association for binary outcomes, along with valid construction of confidence intervals, without sharing of vegetable glycerin for sale individual-level data.