Bibliographic record
Abstract
IntroductionA file’s overall linkage rate may hide significant bias in unlinked records. Newborns, for example, may represent a small percentage of a file but a large proportion of unlinked records. This creates challenges for researchers focused on the affected populations. Decreasing bias is a clear goal for data linkage science. Objectives and ApproachA standard spine-based linkage process with a typical set of identifiers was used to link perinatal records in British Columbia. This included multiple iterations and some manual linkage, stopping when there were only minor improvements. Despite high overall linkage rates, poor rates existed for babies who were stillborn or died near birth. Given research interests in stillbirth, there was a desire to use a creative approach to improve linkage for that sub-population. The solution was to expand the scope of the spine linkage to include birth and stillbirth records from other files, e.g. hospital discharge and Vital Statistics Registrations. ResultsOriginal linkage methods produce overall baby linkage rates of 98.1% but only 3.9% of records discharged to death/stillbirth were linked. Revised methods provide a small change in the overall rate to 99.4% but increase the discharge to death/stillbirth linkage rate to 90.3%. All numbers exclude terminations. Additions to our base representation of a linked entity enabled the association of records for babies either stillborn or never registered for health insurance coverage with the Ministry of Health. Additional variables addressed high rates of missing identifiers, while new linkage processing to Vital Statistics data addressed gaps within multiple newborn related datasets. Conclusion/ImplicationsThe complexity of adding BC Perinatal Data as a linked dataset to Population Data BC holdings was underappreciated. There are always adjustments in linkage approach across different data sets, but the linkage of babies with adverse outcomes required considerably more change, including moving beyond our usual spine linkage approach.
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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 | 0.397 | 0.583 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.008 | 0.018 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
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".