Running head Truncating Length of Stay (original) (raw)

2015

Abstract

Most distributions of hospital length of stay are asymmetric, with a long right tail and some very large observations (outliers). These features vitiate the reliability of many statistical summaries, such as the arithmetic mean, and comparisons based on them. A common remedy is to truncate (i.e., remove) values outside some limits and take the arithmetic mean of the remaining values. In general, the limits are based on a position measure (e.g., mean, median, quartiles) and a scale measure (e.g., standard deviation, median absolute deviation, interquartile range). In addition, a scale transformation (usually the logarithm) is frequently used. Using a data base with almost five millions hospital stays from five European countries, this paper explores the performance of five common truncation rules combining various options on transformation, position and scale. These rules are compared with a new one called « approximated quartile based truncated mean » or AQTM. The AQTM is based on a...

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