Commentary on “The Risky Business of Studying Prognosis”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To the Editor: We have read with great interest the review1 of our recent article2. Lim and Feldman provide valuable insights into the multiple pitfalls and limitations of retrospective studies, aiming to guide readers in better understanding the methodological underpinnings of different study designs and to help in selecting optimal studies to inform their practice. We thank Lim and Feldman for their comments; we take this opportunity to clarify several points. First, we point out that our study does not meet the definition of a “prognostic study,” because “prognostic studies” imply a directional causal relationship between a predictor and an outcome. Indeed, Lim and Feldman quoted an … Address correspondence to Dr. Broder. E-mail: abroder{at}montefiore.org
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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 | 0.012 | 0.072 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.037 | 0.046 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.006 |
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".