Abstract

Epidemiological studies for assessing risk factors often use logistic regression, log-linear models, or other generalized linear models. They involve many decisions, including the choice and coding of risk factors and control variables. It is common practice to select independent variables using a series of significance tests and to choose the way variables are coded somewhat arbitrarily. The overall properties of such a procedure are not well understood, and conditioning on a single model ignores model uncertainty, leading to underestimation of uncertainty about quantities of interest (QUOIs). We describe a Bayesian modeling strategy that formalizes the model selection process and propagates model uncertainty through to inference about QUOIs. Each possible combination of modeling decisions defines a different model, and the models are compared using Bayes factors. Inference about a QUOI is based on an average of its posterior distributions under the individual models, weighted by thei...

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