Thinking Clearly about Association Studies (Risk Factors and Causal Salad included)

besttd: > * IDA seems close to Tukey’s EDA. Is this observation correct? > Yes with the exception of hiding Y for most of the IDA. besttd: > Am I correct in reading f2harrell’s characterization of descriptive studies as: A descriptive study can hardly include a multivariable model of Y? (exceptions to this clunky rule are granted) Yes. Multivariable models can provide the best descriptive statistics because they can analyze more than two variables at a time. A few examples: * Showing the relative explained variation of a set of potential confounders in predicting treatment choice. It’s amazing how many papers using propensity scores fail to decode the scores. * Showing age-adjusted outcomes by strata * Computing the first canonical correlation relating a set of variables to another set of variables, to gauge the total strength of relationship between the sets * Using nonlinear principal components analysis to find pre-transformations of Xs (how one X relates to all the others Xs)