The Multitime Case-control Design for Time-varying Exposures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The conventional approach to improve precision of the odds ratio in a case-control study is to increase the number of controls per case. With time-varying exposures, an alternative is to increase the number of observations per control. METHOD: We present the multitime case-control design, which uses multiple control person-moments of exposure within each control subject. The point and variance estimators of the odds ratio are corrected for within-subject correlation. We illustrate this approach using case-control data from studies of the effects of respiratory medications. RESULTS: Simulations show that, with uncorrelated exposures, it is possible to reduce the variance of the odds ratio by around 30% by increasing the number of control person-moments per subject. With correlated exposures, an accurate variance can be obtained by correcting for within-subject correlation. The corrected variance increases with increasing correlation, depending on the number of control person-moments. The first illustration shows that the rate ratio (RR) of cardiac death associated with β-agonist use, not estimable with 1 control per case (30 cases) and 1 control person-moment, was 4.2 (95% confidence interval = 0.4-49) with 12 control person-moments. The second example finds a rate ratio of acute myocardial infarction associated with antibiotics of 2.00 (1.16-3.44) with 1 control per case, which improves in precision with 10 control subjects per case (RR = 2.13 [1.48-3.05]) but also with 1 control per case and 10 control person-moments per control subject (1.99 [1.36-2.90]). CONCLUSION: When dealing with time-varying exposures, the multitime case-control design can increase the efficiency of conventional case-control studies without additional control subjects.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.096 | 0.134 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".