Thomas Jaki

Deparmtent of Statistics and Mathematics

Lancaster University


Direct Effects Testing: A Two-Stage method for stepwise Testing for Effect Size and Variable Importance for Correlated 2x2 Tables

In applications such as medical statistics and genetics, we frequently encounter situations where a large number of highly correlated predictors explain a response. Constructing a good predictive model in such cases is well studied while recovery of the 'true sparsity pattern', that is finding which predictors have direct effect on the response, and indicating the statistical significance of the results is less well understood. Restricting attention to binary predictors and response, we study the recovery of the true sparsity pattern using a two-stage method that separates the process of establishing the presence of direct effects from inferring their exact relationship with the predictors. Simulations and a real data application demonstrate the method discriminates well between associations and direct effects and comparisons with lasso based methods demonstrate favorable performance of the proposed method.


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