Performance of and software for a modified mantel-haenszel statistic for correlated data

This paper presents the results of a small sample simulation study designed to evaluate the performance of a recently proposed test statistic for the analysis of correlated binary data. The new statistic is an adjusted Mantel-Haenszel test, which may be used in testing for association between a binary exposure and a binary outcome of interest across several fourfold tables when the data have been collected under a cluster sampling design. Al- though originally developed for the analysis of periodontal data, the proposed method may be applied to clustered binary data arising in a variety of settings, including longitu- dinal studies, family studies, and school-based research. The features of the simulation are intended to mimic those of a research study of periodontal health, in which a large number of observations is made on each of a relatively small number of patients. The simulation reveals that the adjusted test statistic performs well in finite samples, having empirical type I error rates close to nominal and empirical power similar to that of more complicated marginal regression methods. Software for computing the adjusted statistic is also provided.