Department of Epidemiology, Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Eur J Epidemiol. 2009;24(12):733-6. doi: 10.1007/s10654-009-9411-2. Epub 2009 Dec 5.
Selection of covariates is among the most controversial and difficult tasks in epidemiologic analysis. Correct variable selection addresses the problem of confounding in etiologic research and allows unbiased estimation of probabilities in prognostic studies. The aim of this commentary is to assess how often different variable selection techniques were applied in contemporary epidemiologic analysis. It was of particular interest to see whether modern methods such as shrinkage or penalized regression were used in recent publications. Stepwise selection methods remained the predominant method for variable selection in publications in epidemiological journals in 2008. Shrinkage methods were not used in any of the reviewed articles. Editors, reviewers and authors have insufficiently promoted the new, less controversial approaches of variable selection in the biomedical literature, whereas statisticians may not have adequately addressed the method's feasibility.
选择协变量是流行病学分析中最具争议和困难的任务之一。正确的变量选择可以解决病因研究中的混杂问题，并允许在预后研究中进行无偏估计概率。本文的目的是评估不同的变量选择技术在当代流行病学分析中应用的频率。特别感兴趣的是，看看最近的出版物中是否使用了现代方法，如收缩或惩罚回归。逐步选择方法仍然是 2008 年发表在流行病学杂志上的文章中进行变量选择的主要方法。在回顾的文章中，没有使用任何收缩方法。编辑、评论家和作者在生物医学文献中对新的、争议较小的变量选择方法的推广不足，而统计学家可能没有充分解决方法的可行性。
