A direct approach for correcting aids incidence: Variance formula and comparison with other methods

We present a direct approach for correcting the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) incidence data for reporting delays, based on a non‐parametric method for the analysis of right truncated data. We show that the proposed method when applied for grouped data is equivalent to three other published methods. We give a simple formula for the variance of the estimated AIDS incidence. Both estimator and variance are assessed in a simulation study. It is important for the estimation of AIDS incidence in the last quarter of the period under consideration to use month rather than quarter or half‐year as the time unit for the analyses. The method is illustrated using data from the United States Centers for Disease Control.