On comparison of clustering methods for pharmacoepidemiological data
Résumé
The high consumption of psychotropic drugs is a public health prob- lem. Rigorous statistical methods are needed to identify consumption characteristics in post-marketing phase. Agglomerative hierarchical clustering (AHC) and latent class analysis (LCA) can both provide clusters of subjects with similar characteristics. The objective of this study was to compare these two methods in pharmacoepidemiology, on several criteria: number of clusters, concordance, interpretation and stability over time. From a data set on bromazepam consump- tion, the two methods present a good concordance. AHC is a very stable method and provides homogeneous classes. LCA is an inferen- tial approach and seems to allow identifying more accurately extreme deviant behaviour.