Attributing Effects to Interactions

Attributing effects to interactions.

A framework is presented that allows an investigator to estimate the portion of the effect of one exposure that is attributable to an interaction with a second exposure. We show that when the 2 exposures are statistically independent in distribution, the total effect of one exposure can be decomposed into a conditional effect of that exposure when the second is absent and also a component due t...

Attributing Illness to Food

Identification and prioritization of effective food safety interventions require an understanding of the relationship between food and pathogen from farm to consumption. Critical to this cause is food attribution, the capacity to attribute cases of foodborne disease to the food vehicle or other source responsible for illness. A wide variety of food attribution approaches and data are used aroun...

Attributing Effects to Treatment in Matched Observational Studies

An effect is attributable to treatment if it would not have been observed had the individual been exposed to control instead. Extending earlier results on attributable effects in unmatched groups, a method of exact randomization inference and sensitivity analysis is developed for case-referent, case-crossover, and cohort studies with matched sets, and a large sample approximation to the exact i...

Attributing Harm to Racist Speech

Attributing awareness to oneself and to others.

This study tested the possible relationship between reported visual awareness ("I see a visual stimulus in front of me") and the social attribution of awareness to someone else ("That person is aware of an object next to him"). Subjects were tested in two steps. First, in an fMRI experiment, subjects were asked to attribute states of awareness to a cartoon face. Activity associated with this ta...