World Health Information Science Consultants, LLC, Newton, MA 02466, USA.
Pharmacoepidemiol Drug Saf. 2010 May;19(5):529-32. doi: 10.1002/pds.1929.
When a biological hypothesis of causal effect can be inferred, the hypothesis can sometimes be tested in the selfsame database that gave rise to the study data from which the hypothesis grew. Valid testing happens when the inferred biological hypothesis has scientific implications that predict new relations between observations already recorded. Testing for the existence of the new relations is a valid assessment of the biological hypothesis, so long as the newly predicted relations are not a logical correlate of the observations that stimulated the hypothesis in the first place. These predictions that lead to valid tests might be called 'orthogonal' predictions in the data, and stand in marked contrast to 'scrawny' hypotheses with no biological content, which predict simply that the same data relations will be seen in a new database. The Universal Data Warehouse will shortly render moot searches for new databases in which to test.
当可以推断出因果效应的生物学假设时，该假设有时可以在产生研究数据的同一个数据库中进行测试，这些研究数据最初产生了该假设。当推断出的生物学假设具有科学意义，可以预测已经记录的观察结果之间的新关系时，有效的测试就会发生。只要新预测的关系不是首先激发假设的观察结果的逻辑相关，那么对新关系的测试就是对生物学假设的有效评估。这些导致有效测试的预测可以在数据中称为“正交”预测，与没有生物学内容的“瘦弱”假设形成鲜明对比，后者只是预测在新数据库中会看到相同的数据关系。通用数据仓库很快将使搜索新数据库进行测试变得毫无意义。
