Comparison of mixed modeling regression methods for the assessment of longitudinal CyTOF® data

A simulation study was conducted to assess Type I error and statistical power of linear mixed models, generalized linear mixed models, and linear quantile mixed models for the analysis of longitudinal cytometry by time-of-flight data. Findings indicate that, while generalized linear mixed models have superior statistical power, they also suffer from inflated Type I error rates. Linear mixed models can have substantially lower statistical power than the other methods at larger effect sizes. While linear quantile mixed models have slightly lower statistical power at smaller effect sizes, they have intermediate statistical power at larger effect sizes and good Type I error control. Taken altogether, these results generally recommend the use of linear quantile mixed models for longitudinal datasets such as for cytometry by time-of-flight data, although linear mixed models may be slightly more useful at small effect sizes and sample sizes.