Is the Risk Difference Really a More Heterogeneous Measure?
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
There are claims in the literature that the risk difference is a more heterogeneous measure than the odds ratio or risk ratio. These claims are based on surveys of meta-analyses showing that tests reject the null hypothesis of homogeneity more often for the risk difference than for the ratio measures. Discussions of this point have neglected the fact that homogeneity tests can have different levels of statistical power (i.e., different probabilities of rejecting the null when it is false) across different scales. We give hypothetical examples in which there is arguably equal heterogeneity across risk difference and odds ratio measures but in which the risk difference homogeneity test rejects more often, and therefore has higher power, than the odds ratio homogeneity test. These examples suggest that current empirical evidence for the claim that the risk difference is more heterogeneous is not at present satisfactory. Further research could consider other approaches to empirical comparisons of the heterogeneity of the three measures.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.048 | 0.066 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.004 |
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 it