Cumsille F, Bangdiwala S I
Escuela de Salud Pública, Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de Chile, Santiago de Chile.
Rev Med Chil. 1996 Jul;124(7):836-42.
It is highly to observe in the biomedical literature, that the continuous variables such as systolic blood pressure and cholesterol, are dichotomized and used in such manner in a given statistical analysis. The consequences of such transformation can be very varied. In this article, how the dichotomization of a continuous exposure variable affects the quality of the prediction of a response using the logistic regression is examined. One can conclude that, in almost all the studied stimulation, the percentages of misclassification can increase drastically, reaching over there times the probability of misclassification of the ones using the original variable. Therefore, we recommend to avoid dichotomization.
在生物医学文献中经常可以观察到，诸如收缩压和胆固醇等连续变量在给定的统计分析中被二分并以这种方式使用。这种转换的后果可能非常多样。在本文中，研究了连续暴露变量的二分如何影响使用逻辑回归预测反应的质量。可以得出结论，在几乎所有研究的刺激中，错误分类的百分比可能会急剧增加，达到使用原始变量时错误分类概率的三倍以上。因此，我们建议避免二分法。
