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Sample Size Implications when Biases are Modelled Rather than Ignored

2006· article· en· W960194649 on OpenAlexaff
Paul Gustafson

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A (Statistics in Society) · 2006
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldDecision Sciences
TopicForecasting Techniques and Applications
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSample size determinationSample (material)EconometricsInferenceEstimatorIdentifiabilityPoolingBayesian probabilityStatisticsPerspective (graphical)Statistical inferenceBayesian inferenceComputer scienceStatistical modelMathematicsArtificial intelligence

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Summary Realistic statistical modelling of observational data often suggests a statistical model which is not fully identified, owing to potential biases that are not under the control of study investigators. Bayesian inference can be implemented with such a model, ideally with the most precise prior knowledge that can be ascertained. However, as a consequence of the non-identifiability, inference cannot be made arbitrarily accurate by choosing the sample size to be sufficiently large. In turn, this has consequences for sample size determination. The paper presents a sample size criterion that is based on a quantification of how much Bayesian learning can arise in a given non-identified model. A global perspective is adopted, whereby choosing larger sample sizes for some studies necessarily implies that some other potentially worthwhile studies cannot be undertaken. This suggests that smaller sample sizes should be selected with non-identified models, as larger sample sizes constitute a squandering of resources in making estimator variances very small compared with their biases. Particularly, consider two investigators planning the same study, one of whom admits to the potential biases at hand and consequently uses a non-identified model, whereas the other pretends that there are no biases, leading to an identified but less realistic model. It is seen that the former investigator always selects a smaller sample size than the latter, with the difference being quite marked in some illustrative cases.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.007
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Teacher disagreement score0.786
Threshold uncertainty score0.895

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.007
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.076
GPT teacher head0.346
Teacher spread0.270 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreMethods

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2006
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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