Waiting for Baseline Stability in Single-Case Designs: Is It Worth the Time and Effort?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Researchers and practitioners often use single-case designs (SCDs), or n-of-1 trials, to develop and validate novel treatments. Standards and guidelines have been published to provide guidance as to how to implement SCDs, but many of their recommendations are not derived from the research literature. For example, one of these recommendations suggests that researchers and practitioners should wait for baseline stability prior to introducing an independent variable. However, this recommendation is not strongly supported by empirical evidence. To address this issue, we used a Monte Carlo simulation to generate a total of 480,000 AB graphs with fixed, response-guided, and random baseline lengths. Then, our analyses compared the Type I error rate and power produced by two methods of analysis: the conservative dual-criteria method (a structured visual aid) and a support vector classifier (a model derived from machine learning). The conservative dual-criteria method produced more power when using response-guided decision-making (i.e., waiting for stability) with negligeable effects on Type I error rate. In contrast, waiting for stability did not reduce decision-making errors with the support vector classifier. Our findings question the necessity of waiting for baseline stability when using SCDs with machine learning, but the study must be replicated with other designs to support our results.
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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 | 0.565 | 0.818 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
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".