与连续治疗相匹配的观测研究中的偏差缓解:校准的非双边匹配和偏差纠正的估计和推断

Biases can arise at various stages of research, from study design and data collection to analysis and interpretation. Recognizing and addressing these biases is essential to ensure the validity and reliability of epidemiological findings.Broadly speaking, biases in epidemiology fall into three main categories: selection bias, information bias, and confounding. A more detailed description of possible biases is:  

Confounding is a critical issue in epidemiological studies, often leading to misleading conclusions about associations between exposures and outcomes. It occurs when the relationship between the exposure and the outcome is mixed with the effects of other factors that influence the outcome. Given that, addressing confounding is of high importance for drawing accurate inferences in research.
Confounding can be addressed at both the design phase of a study and through analytical methods after data...

Bias refers to any tendency that prevents a question from being considered unprejudiced. In research, bias occurs when one outcome or answer is selected or encouraged over others in sampling or testing. Bias can occur during any research phase, including study design, data collection, analysis, and publication.
In statistics, a sampling bias is created when a sample is collected from a population, and some members of the population are not as likely to be chosen as others (remember, each member...

Survival analysis is a statistical method used to analyze time-to-event data, often employed in fields such as medicine, engineering, and social sciences. One of the key challenges in survival analysis is dealing with incomplete data, a phenomenon known as "censoring." Censoring occurs when the event of interest (such as death, relapse, or system failure) has not occurred for some individuals by the end of the study period or is otherwise unobservable, and it might have many different...

Ideally, the people who observe and record the children’s behavior are unaware of who was assigned to the experimental or control group, in order to control for experimenter bias. Experimenter bias refers to the possibility that a researcher’s expectations might skew the results of the study. Remember, conducting an experiment requires a lot of planning, and the people involved in the research project have a vested interest in supporting their hypotheses. If the observers knew which...

The Kaplan-Meier estimator is a non-parametric method used to estimate the survival function from time-to-event data. In medical research, it is frequently employed to measure the proportion of patients surviving for a certain period after treatment. This estimator is fundamental in analyzing time-to-event data, making it indispensable in clinical trials, epidemiological studies, and reliability engineering. By estimating survival probabilities, researchers can evaluate treatment effectiveness,...