English

A Small Sample Correction for Estimating Attributable Risk in Case-Control Studies

Statistics Theory 2008-12-31 v1 Statistics Theory

Abstract

The attributable risk, often called the population attributable risk, is in many epidemiological contexts a more relevant measure of exposure-disease association than the excess risk, relative risk, or odds ratio. When estimating attributable risk with case-control data and a rare disease, we present a simple correction to the standard approach making it essentially unbiased, and also less noisy. As with analogous corrections given in Jewell (1986) for other measures of association, the adjustment often won't make a substantial difference unless the sample size is very small or point estimates are desired within fine strata, but we discuss the possible utility for applications.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0812.4881,
  title  = {A Small Sample Correction for Estimating Attributable Risk in Case-Control Studies},
  author = {Daniel B. Rubin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0812.4881},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

Submitted to the Electronic Journal of Statistics (http://www.i-journals.org/ejs/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)

R2 v1 2026-06-21T11:56:15.700Z