Implications and Recommendations for Equivalence Testing in Measures of Movement Behaviors: A Scoping Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Equivalence testing may provide complementary information to more frequently used statistical procedures because it determines whether physical behavior outcomes are statistically equivalent to criterion measures. A caveat of this procedure is the predetermined selection of upper and lower bounds of acceptable error around a specified zone of equivalence. With no clear guidelines available to assist researchers, these equivalence zones are arbitrarily selected. A scoping review of articles implementing equivalence testing was performed to determine the validity of physical behavior outcomes; the aim was to characterize how this procedure has been implemented and to provide recommendations. A literature search from five databases initially identified potentially 1,153 articles which resulted in the acceptance of 19 studies (20 arms) conducted in children/youth and 40 in adults (49 arms). Most studies were conducted in free-living conditions (children/youth = 13 arms; adults = 22 arms) and employed a ±10% equivalence zone. However, equivalence zones ranged from ±3% to ±25% with only a subset using absolute thresholds (e.g., ±1,000 steps/day). If these equivalence zones were increased or decreased by ±5%, 75% (15/20, children/youth) and 71% (35/49, adults), they would have exhibited opposing equivalence test outcomes (i.e., equivalent to nonequivalent or vice versa). This scoping review identifies the heterogeneous usage of equivalence testing in studies examining the accuracy of (in)activity measures. In the absence of evidence-based standardized equivalence criteria, presenting the percentage required to achieve statistical equivalence or using absolute thresholds as a proportion of the SD may be a better practice than arbitrarily selecting zones a priori.
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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 | 0.387 | 0.700 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.031 | 0.039 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.044 |
| Open science | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.018 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 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; 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".