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Measurement Error

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Handbook of Epidemiology

Abstract

Factors contributing to the presence or absence of disease are not always easily determined or accurately measured. Consequently epidemiologists are often faced with the task of inferring disease patterns using noisy or indirect measurements of risk factors or covariates. Problems of measurement arise for a number of reasons, including for example: reliance on self-reported information; the use of records of suspect quality; intrinsic biological variability; sampling variability; and laboratory analysis error. Although the reasons for imprecise measurement are diverse, the inference problems they create share in common the structure that statistical models must be fit to data formulated in terms of well-defined but unobservable variables X, using information on measurements W that are less than perfectly correlated with X. Problems of this nature are called measurement error problems and the statistical models and methods for analyzing such data are called measurement error models.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Vermont, 16 Colchester Ave, Burlington, Vermont, 05401

    Jeffrey S. Buzas

  2. Department of Statistics North Carolina, State University, Room 201-B, Patterson Hall 2501 Founders Drive, Raleigh, NC, 27695, USA

    Leonard A. Stefanski

  3. Dartmouth Medical School, Rubin 7927 One Medical Center Drive, Lebanon, NH, 03756, USA

    Tor D. Tosteson

Authors
  1. Jeffrey S. Buzas
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  2. Leonard A. Stefanski
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  3. Tor D. Tosteson
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Epidemiological Methods and Ethiologic Research, Bremen Institute for Prevention Research and Social Medicine (BIPS), Linzer Str. 10, 28359, Bremen, Germany

    Wolfgang Ahrens  & Iris Pigeot  & 

  2. Division of Biometrie and Data Management, Bremen Institute for Prevention Research and Social Medicine (BIPS), Linzer Str. 10, 28359, Bremen, Germany

    Wolfgang Ahrens  & Iris Pigeot  & 

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Buzas, J.S., Stefanski, L.A., Tosteson, T.D. (2005). Measurement Error. In: Ahrens, W., Pigeot, I. (eds) Handbook of Epidemiology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-26577-1_19

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