Bayesian regression models for the estimation of net cost of disease using aggregate data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Estimation of net costs attributed to a disease or other health condition is very important for health economists and policy makers. Skewness and heteroscedasticity are well-known characteristics for cost data, making linear models generally inappropriate and dictating the use of other types of models, such as gamma regression. Additional hurdles emerge when individual level data are not available. In this paper, we consider the latter case were data are only available at the aggregate level, containing means and standard deviations for different strata defined by a number of demographic and clinical factors. We summarize a number of methods that can be used for this estimation, and we propose a Bayesian approach that utilizes the sample stratum specific standard deviations as stochastic. We investigate the performance of two linear mixed models, comparing them with two proposed gamma regression mixed models, to analyze simulated data generated by gamma and log-normal distributions. Our proposed Bayesian approach seems to have significant advantages for net cost estimation when only aggregate data are available. The implemented gamma models do not seem to offer the expected benefits over the linear models; however, further investigation and refinement is needed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.020 | 0.064 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".