Effect of zero imputation methods for log-transformation of independent variables in logistic regression

Logistic regression models are commonly used to explain binary health outcome variable using independent variables such as patient characteristics in medical science and public health research. Although there is no distributional assumption required for independent variables in logistic regression, variables with severely right-skewed distribution such as lab values are often log-transformed to achieve symmetry or approximate normality. However, lab values often have zeros due to limit of detection which makes it impossible to apply log-transformation. Therefore, preprocessing to handle zeros in the observation before log-transformation is necessary. In this study, five methods that remove zeros (shift by 1, shift by half of the smallest nonzero, shift by square root of the smallest nonzero, replace zeros with half of the smallest nonzero, replace zeros with the square root of the smallest nonzero) are investigated in logistic regression setting. To evaluate performances of these methods, we performed a simulation study based on randomly generated data from log-normal distribution and logistic regression model. Shift by 1 method has the worst performance, and overall shift by half of the smallest nonzero method, replace zeros with half of the smallest nonzero method, and replace zeros with the square root of the smallest nonzero method showed comparable and stable performances.