Estimating Population Distributions When Some Data Are Below a Limit of Detection by Using a Reverse Kaplan-Meier Estimator

Abstract

The reverse KM estimator is recommended for estimation of the distribution function and population percentiles in preference to commonly used methods such as substituting LOD/2 or LOD/ radical2 for values below the LOD, assuming a known parametric distribution, or using imputation to replace the left-censored values.