Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Bias and Confounding
Bias and Confounding
HYPOTHESIS FORMULATION
AND ERRORS IN RESEARCH
• A better example:
“Babies who are exclusively breast-fed for
three months or more will have a
reduction in the incidence of hospital
admissions for gastroenteritis of at least
30% over the first year of life.”
Only specific prediction allows one to
draw legitimate conclusions from a
study which tests a hypothesis. But
even with the best formulated
hypothesis, two types of errors can
occur.
• RANDOM ERROR
• RANDOM MISCLASSIFICATION
• BIAS
• CONFOUNDING
RANDOM ERROR
1. SELECTION BIAS