Evidence Based Medicine pills
Evidence Based Medicine pills
Human cognition is reexamined through the lens of machine learning, proposing stochastic determinism as a technical alternative to free will. By equating creativity with the temperature of generative models and learning with error minimization via gradient descent, it is concluded that biological and artificial intelligences operate under the same fundamental algorithmic logic.
How unmeasured confounding can distort associations in observational studies is reviewed, and parameters to quantify this effect are presented. This article explains how the E-value quantifies the minimum strength that an unmeasured confounder would need to have in order to fully explain an observed effect or make it compatible with the absence of association. Finally, it briefly discusses its extensions to different effect measures and its complementary role to p-values in critical appraisal.
Principal component analysis (PCA) is a statistical dimensionality reduction technique that transforms correlated variables into independent orthogonal components. Its purpose is to simplify complex data structures by maximizing explained variance and eliminating informational redundancy through methods such as singular value decomposition.
The central limit theorem states that if we take a sufficiently large number of random samples from the same population and calculate the mean for each sample, the distribution of those means will tend to follow a normal distribution, regardless of the original distribution of the data. This allows for the safe application of many statistical analyses, such as estimating confidence intervals and hypothesis testing.
The post analyzes the problem of class imbalance in biomedical models and how overall accuracy can become useless when the minority class is the clinically relevant one. It explains which evaluation metrics are most appropriate and outlines the main strategies to handle imbalance, such as oversampling (SMOTE, ADASYN), selective undersampling (Tomek links), and ensemble methods that stabilize performance in low-prevalence scenarios.