Optimal Fingerprinting with Estimating Equations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Climate change detection and attribution have played a central role in establishing the influence of human activities on climate. Optimal fingerprinting, a linear regression with errors in variables (EIVs), has been widely used in detection and attribution analyses of climate change. The method regresses observed climate variables on the expected climate responses to the external forcings, which are measured with EIVs. The reliability of the method depends critically on proper point and interval estimations of the regression coefficients. The confidence intervals constructed from the prevailing method, total least squares (TLS), have been reported to be too narrow to match their nominal confidence levels. We propose a novel framework to estimate the regression coefficients based on an efficient, bias-corrected estimating equations approach. The confidence intervals are constructed with a pseudo residual bootstrap variance estimator that takes advantage of the available control runs. Our regression coefficient estimator is unbiased, with a smaller variance than the TLS estimator. Our estimation of the sampling variability of the estimator has a low bias compared to that from TLS, which is substantially negatively biased. The resulting confidence intervals for the regression coefficients have coverage rates close to the nominal level, which ensures valid inferences in detection and attribution analyses. In applications to the annual mean near-surface air temperature at the global, continental, and subcontinental scales during 1951–2020, the proposed method led to shorter confidence intervals than those based on TLS in most of the analyses. Significance Statement Optimal fingerprinting is an important statistical tool for estimating human influences on the climate and for quantifying the associated uncertainty. Nonetheless, the estimators from the prevailing practice are not as optimal as believed, and their uncertainties are underestimated, both owing to the unreliable estimation of the optimal weight matrix that is critical to the method. Here we propose an estimation method based on the theory of estimating equations; to assess the uncertainty of the resulting estimator, we propose a pseudo bootstrap procedure. Through extensive numerical studies commonly used in statistical investigations, we demonstrate that the new estimator has a smaller mean-square error, and its uncertainty is estimated much closer to the true uncertainty than the prevailing total least squares method.
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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 | 0.020 | 0.106 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".