Annals of Epidemiology
Volume 20, Issue 10 , Pages 772-778 , October 2010

Does Ignoring Model Selection When Assessing the Effect of Particulate Matter Air Pollution on Mortality Make Us Too Vigilant?

  • Steven Roberts, PhD

      Affiliations

    • Corresponding Author InformationAddress correspondence to: Steven Roberts, PhD, School of Finance, Actuarial Studies and Applied Statistics, College of Business and Economics, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia. Tel.: +61-2-6125-3470; Fax: +61-2-6125-0087.
    • ,
  • Michael A. Martin, PhD

Received 21 May 2009 ,Accepted 14 March 2010.

References 

  1. Dominici F, Peng RD, Zeger SL, White RH, Samet JM. Particulate air pollution in the United States: Did the risks change from 1987 to 2000?. Am J Epidemiol. 2007;166:880–888
  2. Ren C, Tong S. Health effects of ambient air pollution—recent research development and contemporary methodological challenges. Environ Health. 2008;7:56
  3. Touloumi G, Samoli E, Quenel P, Paldy A, Anderson RH, Zmirou D, et al. Short-term effects of air pollution on total and cardiovascular mortality: The confounding effect of influenza epidemics. Epidemiology. 2005;16:49–57
  4. Welty LJ, Peng RD, Zeger SL, Dominici F. Bayesian distributed lag models: Estimating effects of particulate matter air pollution on daily mortality. Biometrics. 2009;65:282–291
  5. Clyde M. Model uncertainty and health effect studies for particulate matter. Environmetrics. 2000;11:745–763
  6. Koop G, Tole L. Measuring the health effects of air pollution: To what extent can we really say that people are dying from bad air?. J Environ Econ Manage. 2004;47:30–54
  7. Draper D. Assessment and propagation of model uncertainty (with Discussion). J R Statistic Soc B. 1995;56:45–98
  8. Lumley T, Sheppard L. Assessing seasonal confounding and model selection bias in air pollution epidemiology using positive and negative control analyses. Environmetrics. 2000;11:705–717
  9. Peng RD, Dominici F, Louis TA. Model choice in time series studies of air pollution and mortality. J R Statistic Soc A. 2006;169:179–203
  10. Martin MA, Roberts S. Bootstrap model averaging in time series studies of particulate matter air pollution and mortality. J Expo Sci Environ Epidemiol. 2006;16:242–250
  11. Roberts S, Martin MA. Bootstrap-after-bootstrap model averaging for reducing model uncertainty in model selection for air pollution mortality studies. Environ Health Perspect. 2010;118:131–136
  12. Roberts S, Martin MA. The question of nonlinearity in the dose-response relation between particulate matter air pollution and mortality: Can Akaike's Information Criterion be trusted to take the right turn?. Am J Epidemiol. 2006;164:1242–1250
  13. Crainiceanu CM, Dominici F, Parmigiani G. Adjustment uncertainty in effect estimation. Biometrika. 2008;95:635–651
  14. Martin MA, Roberts S. A regression approach for estimating multiday adverse health effects of PM10 when daily PM10 data are unavailable. Am J Epidemiol. 2008;167:1511–1517
  15. Burnham KP, Anderson DR. Model Selection and Multimodal Inference: A Practical Information-Theoretic Approach. 2nd ed.. New York: Springer; 2002;p. 158–164
  16. Peng RD, Dominici F, Pastor-Barriiuso R, Zeger SL, Samet JM. Seasonal analyses of air pollution and mortality in 100 US cities. Am J Epidemiol. 2005;161:585–594
  17. Roberts S, Martin MA. Applying a moving total mortality count to the cities in the NMMAPS database to estimate the mortality effects of particulate matter air pollution. Occup Environ Med. 2006;63:193–197
  18. Daniels MJ, Dominici F, Zeger S. Underestimation of standard errors in multi-site time series studies. Epidemiology. 2004;15:57–62

PII: S1047-2797(10)00076-1

doi: 10.1016/j.annepidem.2010.03.019

Annals of Epidemiology
Volume 20, Issue 10 , Pages 772-778 , October 2010

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