10 ms·
Statistically. You build a model that describes how likely people are to get diagnosed with Alzhimer's as a function of sex: maybe 12 women out of 100 get it,
by mattkrause 1mo ago
Statistically.
You build a model that describes how likely people are to get diagnosed with Alzhimer's as a function of sex: maybe 12 women out of 100 get it, while 8/100 men are diagnosed. You can do the same thing for age: almost nobody is diagnosed before 30, it's very rare before 40, and sadly common (~1 in 10) after 65 years of age. There are all sorts of mathematical tricks to include multiple variables, account for the fact that you can only be diagnosed once, or that data is "censored" (i.e., missing) at some ages because people have already died.
Based on that, you can then ask if the prevalence of Alzheimer's Disease among cab drivers is surprising, given their demographics. For example, if we know that they skew male and younger, we'd expect that number to be a bit lower than a naive estimate of 10%. In fact, we can calculate that number and then see if it's unexpected given the number we actually see. In practice, you'd actually do this by fitting two models: one containing job and one that doesn't, and see which one best describes the data and how, specifically, the job factor affects the outcome.
However, how well these adjustments work depends on the quality of your data and your modelling. Your model could be missing important factors or have the wrong structure: (e.g., you assume risk is directly proportional to age, but it actually increases more rapidly as you get older). Your data could have problems too: maybe women are more likely to go to the doctor (and thus get diagnosed), even if the actual prevalence is the same.