Abstract Statistical methods such as latent class analysis can estimate the sensitivity and specificity of diagnostic tests when no perfect reference test exists. Traditional latent class methods assume a constant disease prevalence in one or more tested populations. When the risk of disease...

Abstract In epidemiology many exposures of interest are measured with error. Random, or 'classical', error in exposure measurements attenuates linear exposure-disease associations. However, its precise effects on different nonlinear associations are not well known. We use simulation studies to...

Abstract We propose the minicommunity design to estimate indirect effects of vaccination. Establishing indirect effects of vaccination in unvaccinated subpopulations could have important implications for global vaccine policies. In the minicommunity design, the household or other small...

Abstract Interactions measured on the additive scale are more relevant than multiplicative interaction for assessing public health importance and also more closely related to notions of mechanistic synergism. Most work on sample size and power calculations for interaction have focused on the...

Abstract To investigate the association between a continuous exposure and an outcome it is common to categorize the exposure and estimate the relative associations between categories. Error in measurement of the continuous exposure results in misclassification when the exposure is categorized....

Abstract Mediation analysis is widely adopted to infer causal mechanism by disentangling indirect or mediated effects of an exposure on an outcome through given intermediaries, from the remaining direct effect. Traditional approaches build on standard regression models for the outcome and...

Abstract The between-within (BW) model is a popular regression model for twin data. Despite its popularity, the properties of the BW model have not yet been thoroughly investigated, and most reviews are largely heuristic. The aim of this paper is to provide a formal guide to the causal...

Abstract For decades, social scientists have been trying to answer causal questions about the effectiveness of certain programs or policies. The conventional methodology for answering such causal questions relies on the “no interference between different units” assumption; that is, a...