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Criteria for confounders in epidemiological studies

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  • Zhi Geng
  • Jianhua Guo
  • Wing‐Kam Fung

Abstract

The paper addresses a formal definition of a confounder based on the qualitative definition that is commonly used in standard epidemiology text‐books. To derive the criterion for a factor to be a confounder given by Miettinen and Cook and to clarify inconsistency between various criteria for a confounder, we introduce the concepts of an irrelevant factor, an occasional confounder and a uniformly irrelevant factor. We discuss criteria for checking these and show that Miettinen and Cook's criterion can also be applied to occasional confounders. Moreover, we consider situations with multiple potential confounders, and we obtain two necessary conditions that are satisfied by each confounder set. None of the definitions and results presented in this paper require the ignorability and sufficient control confounding assumptions which are commonly employed in observational and epidemiological studies.

Suggested Citation

  • Zhi Geng & Jianhua Guo & Wing‐Kam Fung, 2002. "Criteria for confounders in epidemiological studies," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 64(1), pages 3-15, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jorssb:v:64:y:2002:i:1:p:3-15
    DOI: 10.1111/1467-9868.00321
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    Cited by:

    1. Bareinboim Elias & Pearl Judea, 2013. "A General Algorithm for Deciding Transportability of Experimental Results," Journal of Causal Inference, De Gruyter, vol. 1(1), pages 107-134, June.
    2. Tyler J. VanderWeele & James M. Robins, 2010. "Signed directed acyclic graphs for causal inference," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 72(1), pages 111-127, January.

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