Abstract
Cornfield, Haenszel, Hammond, Lilienfeld, Shimkin, and Wynder (1959) first conducted a formal sensitivity analysis in an observational study. Their paper is a survey of the evidence available in 1959 linking smoking with lung cancer. The paper asks whether the association between smoking and lung cancer is an effect caused by smoking or whether it is instead due to a hidden bias. Can lung cancer be prevented by not smoking? Or are the higher rates of lung cancer among smokers due to some other difference between smokers and nonsmokers?
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Aakvik, A. (2001) Bounding a matching estimator: The case of a Norwegian training program. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 63, 115–143.
Aiken, L. H., Smith, H. L., and Lake, E. T. (1994) Lower Medicare mortality among a set of hospitals known for good nursing care. Medical Care, 32, 771–787.
Armitage, P. (1977) Statistical Methods in Medical Research (fourth printing), Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Balke, A. and Pearl, J. (1997) Bounds on treatment effects from studies with imperfect compliance. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 92, 1172–1176.
Bickel, P. and van Zwet, (1978) Asymptotic expansions for the power of distribution free tests in the two-sample problem. Annals of Statistics, 6, 937–1004.
Boston Collaborative Drug Pro j ect (1972) Excess of ampicillin rashes associated with allopurinol or hyperuricemia. New England Journal of Medicine, 286, 505–507.
Breslow, N. and Day, N. (1980) Statistical Methods in Cancer Research, I: The Analysis of Case-Control Studies. Lyon, France: International Agency for Research on Cancer.
Bross, I. D. J. (1966) Spurious effects from an extraneous variable. Journal of Chronic Diseases, 19, 637–647.
Bross, I. D. J. (1967) Pertinency of an extraneous variable. Journal of Chronic Diseases, 20, 487–495.
Cameron, E. and Pauling, L. (1976) Supplemental ascorbate in the supportive treatment of cancer: Prolongation of survival times in terminal human cancer. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), 73, 3685–3689.
Copas, J. B. and Li, H. G. (1997) Inference for non-random samples (with discussion). Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, B, 59, 55–96.
Cornfield, J., Haenszel, W., Hammond, E., Lilienfeld, A., Shimkin, M., and Wynder, E. (1959). Smoking and lung cancer: Recent evidence and a discussion of some questions. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 22, 173–203.
Davanzo, P., Thomas, M. A., Yue, K., Oshiro, T., Belin, T., Strober, M., and McCracken, J. (2001) Decreased anterior cingulate myoinositol/creatine spectoscopy resonance with lithium treatment in children with bipolar disorder. Neuropsychopharmacology, 24, 359 – 369.
Eaton, M. (1987) Lectures on Topics in Probability Inequalities. Amsterdam: Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica.
Eidson, M., Philen, R. M., Sewell, C. M., Voorhees, R., and Kilbourne, E. M. (1990) L-tryptophan and eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome in New Mexico. Lancet, 335, 645–648.
Fisher, R.A. (1958) Lung cancer and cigarettes? Nature, 182, July 12, 108.
Freidlin, B. and Gastwirth, J. L. (2000) Should the median test be retired from general use? American Statistician, 54, 161–164.
Gastwirth, J. L. (1988) Statistical Reasoning in Law and Public Policy. New York: Academic.
Gastwirth, J. L. (1992a) Employment discrimination: A statistician’s look at analysis of disparate impact claims. Law and Inequality, 11, 151 – 179.
Gastwirth, J. L. (1992b) Methods for assessing the sensitivity of statistical comparisons used in Title VII cases to omitte variahles Jurimetrics Journal, 19–34.
Gastwirth, J. L. and Greenhouse, S. (1987) Estimating a common relative risk: Application in equal employment. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 82, 38–45.
Gastwirth, J. L., Krieger, A. M. and Rosenbaum, P. R. (1998a) Cornfield’s inequality. In: Encyclopedia of Biostatistics, P. Armitage and T. Colton, eds., New York: Wiley, pp. 952–955.
Gastwirth, J. L., Krieger, A. M., and Rosenbaum, P. R. (1998b) Dual and simultaneous sensitivity analysis for matched pairs. Biometrika, 85, 907–920.
Gastwirth, J. L., Krieger, A. M., and Rosenbaum, P. R. (2000) Asymptotic separability in sensitivity analysis. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 62, 545–555.
Gibbons, J. D. (1982) Brown-Mood median test. In: Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences, Volume 1, S. Kotz and N. Johnson, eds., New York: Wiley, pp. 322–324.
Graham, A. J., Macdonald, A. M., and Hawkes, C. H. (1997) British motor neuron disease twin study. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, 6, 562–569.
Greenhouse, S. (1982) Jerome Cornfield’s contributions to epidemiology. Biometrics, 38S, 33–46.
Greenland, S. (1996) Basic methods of sensitivity analysis of biases. International Journal of Epidemiology, 25, 1107–1116.
Gu, X. S. and Rosenbaum, P. R. (1993) Comparison of multivariate matching methods: Structures, distances and algorithms. Journal of Computational and Grapical Statistics, 2, 405–420.
Hájek, J., Sidák, Z. and Sen, P. K. (1999) Theory of Rank Tests (Second Edition) . New York: Academic.
Hakulinen, T. (1981) A Mantel-Haenszel statistic for testing the association between a polychotomous exposure and a rare outcome. American Journal of Epidemiology, 113 ,192–197.
Hammond, E. C. (1964) Smoking in relation to mortality and morbidity: Findings in first thirty-four months of follow-up in a prospective study started in 1959. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 32, 1161 – 1188.
Hannan, J. and Harkness, W. (1963) Normal approximation to the distribution of two independent binomials, conditional on a fixed sum. Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 34, 1593–1595.
Harkness, W. (1965) Properties of the extended hypergeometric distribution. Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 36, 938–945.
Herbst, A., Ulfelder, H., and Poskanzer, D. (1971) Adenocarcinoma of the vagina: Association of maternal stilbestrol therapy with tumor appearance in young women. New England Journal of Medicine, 284, 878–881.
Hettmansperger, T. (1984) Statistical Inference Based on Ranks. New York: Wiley.
Hodges, J. and Lehmann, E. (1962) Rank methods for combination of individual experiments in the analysis of variance. Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 33, 482–497.
Hodges, J. and Lehmann, E. (1963) Estimates of location based on rank tests. Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 34, 598–611.
Hollander, M., Proschan, F., and Sethuraman, J. (1977) Functions decreasing in transposition and their applications in ranking problems. Annals of Statistics, 5, 722–733.
Hollander, M. and Wolfe, D. (1973, 1999) Nonparametric Statistical Methods. New York: Wiley.
Holley, R. (1974) Remarks on the FKG inequalities. Communications in Mathematical Physics, 36, 227–231.
Jick, H., Miettinen, O., Neff, R., et al. (1973) Coffee and myocardial infarction. New England Journal of Medicine, 289, 63–77.
Johnson, N., Kotz, S., and Kemp, A. (1992) Univariate Discrete Distributions. New York: Wiley.
Kelsey, J. and Hardy, R. (1975) Driving of motor vehicles as a risk factor for acute herniated lumbar intervertebral disc. American Journal of Epidemiology, 102, 63–73.
Kevekordes, S., Gebel, T. W., Hellwig, M., Dames, W., and Dunkelberg, H. (1998) Human effect monitoring in cases of occupational exposure to antineoplastic drugs: a method comparison. Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 55, 145–149.
Krieger, A. M. and Rosenbaum, P. R. (1994) A stochastic comparison for arrangement increasing functions. Combinatorics, Probability and Computing, 3, 345–348.
Lehmann, E. (1975) Nonparametrics: Statistical Methods Based on Ranks. San Francisco: Holden-Day.
Lin, D. Y., Psaty, B. M., and Kronmal, R. A. (1998) Assessing the sensitivity of regression results to unmeasured confounders in observational studies. Biometrics, 54, 948–963.
Mack, T., Pike, M., Henderson, B., Pfeffer, R., Gerkins, V., Arthur, B., and Brown, S. (1976) Estrogens and endometrial cancer in a retirement community. New England Journal of Medicine, 294, 1262–1267.
Mann, H. and Whitney, D. (1947) On a test of whether one of two random variables is stochastically larger than the other. Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 18, 50–60.
Manski, C. (1990) Nonparametric bounds on treatment effects. American Economic Review, 319–323.
Manski, C. (1995) Identification Problems in the Social Sciences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mantel, N. and Haenszel, W. (1959) Statistical aspects of retrospective studies of disease. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 22, 719–748.
Marcus, S. (1997) Using omitted variable bias to assess uncertainty in the estimation of an AIDS education treatment effect. Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, 22, 193–202.
Marshall, A. and Olkin, I. (1979) Inequalities: Theory of Majorization and Its Applications. New York: Academic.
McNemar, Q. (1947) Note on the sampling errorof the differences between correlated proportions or percentages. Psychometrika, 12, 153–157.
Miettinen, O. (1969) Individual matching with multiple controls in the case of all or none responses. Biometrics, 22, 339–355.
Ming, K. and Rosenbaum, P. R. (2000) Substantial gains in bias reduction from matching with a variable number of controls. Biometrics, 56, 118–124.
Moertel, C., Fleming, T., Creagan, E., Rubin, J., O’Connell, M., and Ames, M. (1985) High-dose vitamin C vs placebo in the treatment of patients with advanced cancer who have had no prior chemotherapy: A randomized double-blind comparison. New England Journal of Medicine, 312, 137–141.
Morton, D., Saah, A., Silberg, S., Owens, W., Roberts, M., and Saah, M. (1982) Lead absorption in children of employees in a lead related industry. American Journal of Epidemiology, 115, 549–555.
Mosteller, F. and Tukey, J. (1977) Data Analysis and Regression. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Nicholson, W., Selikoff, I., Seidman, H., Lilis, R., and Formby, P. (1979) Long-term mortality experience of chrysotile miners and millers in Thetford Mines, Quebec. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 330, 11–21.
Normand, S. T., Landrum, M. B., Guadagnoli, E., Ayanian, J. Z., Ryan, T. J., Cleary, P. D., and McNeil, B. J. (2001) Validating recommendations for coronary angiography following acute myocardial infarction in the elderly: A matched analysis using propensity scores. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 54, 387–398.
O’Brien, P. C. and Fleming, T. R. (1987) A paired Prentice-Wilcoxon test for censored paired data. Biometrics, 43, 169–180.
Pearl, J. (2000) Causality. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Peters, J. M., Preston-Martin, S., and Yu, M. C. (1981) Brain tumors in children and occupational exposure of parents. Science, 213, 235–236.
Plackett, R. L. (1981) The Analysis of Categorical Data (second edition). New York: Macmillan.
Psaty, B. M., Koepsell, T. D., Lin, D., Weiss, N., Siscovick, D. S., Rosendaal, F. R., Pahor, M., and Furberg, C. D. (1999) Assessment and control for confounding by indication in observational studies. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 47, 749–754.
Quade, D. (1979) Using weighted rankings in the analysis of complete blocks with additive block effects. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 74, 680–683.
Rosenbaum, P. R. (1986) Dropping out of high school in the United States: An observational study. Journal of Educational Statistics, 11, 207–224.
Rosenbaum, P. R. (1987) Sensitivity analysis for certain permutation inferences in matched observational studies. Biometrika, 74, 13–26.
Rosenbaum, P. R. (1988) Sensitivity analysis for matching with multiple controls. Biometrika, 75, 577–581.
Rosenbaum, P. R. (1989) On permutation tests for hidden biases in observational studies: An application of Holley’s inequality to the Savage lattice. Annals of Statistics, 17, 643–653.
Rosenbaum, P. R. (1991a) Sensitivity analysis for matched case-control studies. Biometrics, 47, 87–100.
Rosenbaum, P. R. (1991b) Discussing hidden bias in observational studies. Annals of Internal Medicine, 115, 901–905.
Rosenbaum, P. R. (1991c) A characterization of optimal designs for observational studies. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B,53, 597–610.
Rosenbaum, P. R. (1993) Hodges-Lehmann point estimates of treatment effect in observational studies. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 88, 1250–1253.
Rosenbaum, P. R. (1995) Quantiles in nonrandom samples and observational studies. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 90, 11424–1431.
Rosenbaum, P. R. (1999a) Using combined quantile averages in matched observational studies. Applied Statistics, 48, 63–78.
Rosenbaum, P. R. (1999b) Reduced sensitivity to hidden bias at upper quantiles in observational studies with dilated effects. Biometrics, 55, 560–564.
Rosenbaum, P. R. (1999) Holley’s inequality. In: Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences, Update Volume 3, S. Kotz, C. B. Read, and D. L. Banks, eds., New York: Wiley, pp. 329–331.
Rosenbaum, P. R. (2001) Effects attributable to treatment: Inference in experiments and observational studies with a discrete pivot. Biometrika, 88, 219–232.
Rosenbaum, P. R. and Krieger, A. M. (1990) Sensitivity analysis for twosample permutation inferences in observational studies. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 85, 493–498.
Rosenbaum, P. R. and Rubin, D. B. (1983) Assessing sensitivity to an unobserved binary covariate in an observational study with binary outcome. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B,45, 212 –218.
Rubin, D. B. (1978) Bayesian inference for causal effects: The role of randomization. Annals of Statistics, 6, 34–58.
Savage, I. R. (1964) Contributions to the theory of rank order statistics: Applications of lattice theory. Review of the International Statistical Institute, 32, 52–63.
Schlesselmann, J. J. (1978) Assessing the effects of confounding variables. American Journal of Epidemiology, 108, 3–8.
Skerfving, S., Hansson, K., Mangs, C., Lindsten, J., and Ryman, N. (1974) Methylmercury-induced chromosome damage in man. Environmental Research, 7, 83–98.
Smith, H. L. (1997) Matching with multiple controls to estimate treatment effects in observational studies. Sociological Methodology, 27, 325 – 353.
Stevens, W. L. (1951) Mean and variance of an entry in a contingency table. Biometrika, 38, 468–470.
Tardif, S. (1987) Efficiency and optimality results for tests based on weighted rankings. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 82, 637–644.
Tukey, J. W. (1957) Sums of random partitions of ranks. Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 28, 987–992.
Wilcoxon, F. (1945) Individual comparisons by ranking methods. Biometrics, 1, 80–83.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rosenbaum, P.R. (2002). Sensitivity to Hidden Bias. In: Observational Studies. Springer Series in Statistics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3692-2_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3692-2_4
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-3191-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-4757-3692-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive