Discussion of the manuscript: Spatial+ a novel approach to spatial confounding

07/04/2021
by   Georgia Papadogeorgou, et al.
0

I congratulate Dupont, Wood and Augustin (DWA hereon) for providing an easy-to-implement method for estimation in the presence of spatial confounding, and for addressing some of the complicated aspects on the topic. The method regresses the covariate of interest on spatial basis functions and uses the residuals of this model in an outcome regression. The authors show that, if the covariate is not completely spatial, this approach leads to consistent estimation of the conditional association between the exposure and the outcome. Below I discuss conceptual and operational issues that are fundamental to inference in spatial settings: (i) the target quantity and its interpretability, (ii) the non-spatial aspect of covariates and their relative spatial scales, and (iii) the impact of spatial smoothing. While DWA provide some insights on these issues, I believe that the audience might benefit from a deeper discussion. In what follows, I focus on the setting where a researcher is interested in interpreting the relationship between a given covariate and an outcome. I refer to the covariate of interest as the exposure to differentiate it from the rest.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
01/13/2023

Re-thinking Spatial Confounding in Spatial Linear Mixed Models

In the last two decades, considerable research has been devoted to a phe...
research
08/23/2023

Consistency of common spatial estimators under spatial confounding

This paper addresses the asymptotic performance of popular spatial regre...
research
07/28/2019

Mitigating unobserved spatial confounding bias with mixed models

Confounding by unmeasured spatial variables has received some attention ...
research
10/30/2021

The Missing Covariate Indicator Method is Nearly Valid Almost Always

Background: Although the missing covariate indicator method (MCIM) has b...
research
05/08/2018

Using Simpson's Paradox to Discover Interesting Patterns in Behavioral Data

We describe a data-driven discovery method that leverages Simpson's para...
research
04/02/2013

On the definition of a confounder

The causal inference literature has provided a clear formal definition o...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset