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Record W2791760629 · doi:10.1093/bjps/axx015

The Confounding Question of Confounding Causes in Randomized Trials

2017· article· en· W2791760629 on OpenAlex
Jonathan Fuller

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe British Journal for the Philosophy of Science · 2017
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMathematics
TopicAdvanced Causal Inference Techniques
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
FundersCanadian Institutes of Health ResearchUniversity of JohannesburgW. Garfield Weston FoundationUniversità degli Studi di GenovaUniversity of TorontoKing's College London
KeywordsConfoundingCausal inferenceRandomized controlled trialIdeal (ethics)RandomizationInferenceBalance (ability)PsychologyMedicineStatisticsComputer scienceMathematicsPhilosophyEpistemologyInternal medicineArtificial intelligence

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

It is sometimes thought that randomized study group allocation is uniquely proficient at producing comparison groups that are evenly balanced for all confounding causes. Philosophers have argued that in real randomized controlled trials this balance assumption typically fails. But is the balance assumption an important ideal? I run a thought experiment, the CONFOUND study, to answer this question. I then suggest a new account of causal inference in ideal and real comparative group studies that helps clarify the roles of confounding variables and randomization. 1Confounders and Causes2The Balance Assumption3The CONFOUND Study 3.1CONFOUND 13.2CONFOUND 24Disjunction C and the Ideal Study 4.1The ultimate 'other cause': C4.2The ideal comparative group study4.3Required conditions for causal inference5Confounders as Causes, Confounders as Correlates6Summary.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.055
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.079
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Science and technology studies
Consensus categoriesMetaresearch, Science and technology studies
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.294
Threshold uncertainty score0.996

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0550.079
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0050.007
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0020.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.304
GPT teacher head0.492
Teacher spread0.189 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it