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Criteria for confounders in epidemiological studies
Author(s) -
Geng Zhi,
Guo Jianhua,
Fung WingKam
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
journal of the royal statistical society: series b (statistical methodology)
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.523
H-Index - 137
eISSN - 1467-9868
pISSN - 1369-7412
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9868.00321
Subject(s) - confounding , observational study , epidemiology , set (abstract data type) , factor (programming language) , medicine , statistics , computer science , mathematics , pathology , programming language
The paper addresses a formal definition of a confounder based on the qualitative definition that is commonly used in standard epidemiology text‐books. To derive the criterion for a factor to be a confounder given by Miettinen and Cook and to clarify inconsistency between various criteria for a confounder, we introduce the concepts of an irrelevant factor, an occasional confounder and a uniformly irrelevant factor. We discuss criteria for checking these and show that Miettinen and Cook's criterion can also be applied to occasional confounders. Moreover, we consider situations with multiple potential confounders, and we obtain two necessary conditions that are satisfied by each confounder set. None of the definitions and results presented in this paper require the ignorability and sufficient control confounding assumptions which are commonly employed in observational and epidemiological studies.