Variable Screening Methods in Conditional Logistic Individual Level Models of Disease Spread
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.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The conditional logistic individual-level model is a recently developed infectious disease model, particularly suited for modeling spatial-based infection risk. It is designed to reduce computational complexity and expand the range of available statistical software for data analysis (Akter & Deardon, 2025). This study aims to apply and evaluate different variable selection techniques for the newly introduced conditional logistic individual-level models (CL-ILMs). These variable selection methods include forward and backward stepwise Akaike information criterion (AIC), least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso), spike-and-slab prior (SS prior), and two-stage screening methods. The ultimate goal is to boost model performance and interpretability, and to reduce the risk of overfitting ultimately leading to more robust and effective models. We examine and compare the performance of these methods using simulated data and real-life data from the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the UK in 2001. • This study proposes novel variable screening methods for spatial CL-ILMs. • We explore stepwise AIC, Lasso, spike-and-slab, and two-stage prescreening methods. • We assess variable selection methods using simulated datasets and real-world data. • Overall, Lasso showed lower accuracy, while spike-and-slab priors performed better. • This aligns with ILM results (Akter & Deardon, 2023), where spike-and-slab was best.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it