A comparison of Bayesian and Monte Carlo sensitivity analysis for unmeasured confounding
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bias from unmeasured confounding is a persistent concern in observational studies, and sensitivity analysis has been proposed as a solution. In the recent years, probabilistic sensitivity analysis using either Monte Carlo sensitivity analysis (MCSA) or Bayesian sensitivity analysis (BSA) has emerged as a practical analytic strategy when there are multiple bias parameters inputs. BSA uses Bayes theorem to formally combine evidence from the prior distribution and the data. In contrast, MCSA samples bias parameters directly from the prior distribution. Intuitively, one would think that BSA and MCSA ought to give similar results. Both methods use similar models and the same (prior) probability distributions for the bias parameters. In this paper, we illustrate the surprising finding that BSA and MCSA can give very different results. Specifically, we demonstrate that MCSA can give inaccurate uncertainty assessments (e.g. 95% intervals) that do not reflect the data's influence on uncertainty about unmeasured confounding. Using a data example from epidemiology and simulation studies, we show that certain combinations of data and prior distributions can result in dramatic prior-to-posterior changes in uncertainty about the bias parameters. This occurs because the application of Bayes theorem in a non-identifiable model can sometimes rule out certain patterns of unmeasured confounding that are not compatible with the data. Consequently, the MCSA approach may give 95% intervals that are either too wide or too narrow and that do not have 95% frequentist coverage probability. Based on our findings, we recommend that analysts use BSA for probabilistic sensitivity analysis. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.020 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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