ArticleOccupational and environmental medicine2013
Inside the black box: starting to uncover the underlying decision rules used in a one-by-one expert assessment of occupational exposure in case-control studies.
Article in Occupational and environmental medicine, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- A Clinician's Guide to Occupational Exposures in the Military.Current allergy and asthma reports · 2022Review
- Comparison of agreement in asthmagen exposure assessments between rule-based automatic algorithms and a job exposure matrix in healthcare workers in Australia and Bhutan.BMC public health · 2022Article
- Testing and Validating Semi-automated Approaches to the Occupational Exposure Assessment of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons.Annals of work exposures and health · 2021Article
- Maternal occupational exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and the risk of isolated congenital heart defects among offspring.Environmental research · 2020Article
- Using Decision Rules to Assess Occupational Exposure in Population-Based Studies.Current environmental health reports · 2019Review
- A hybrid expert approach for retrospective assessment of occupational exposures in a population-based case-control study of cancer.Environmental health : a global access science source · 2019Article
- Use and Reliability of Exposure Assessment Methods in Occupational Case-Control Studies in the General Population: Past, Present, and Future.Annals of work exposures and health · 2018Review
- Pleural plaques in lung cancer screening by low-dose computed tomography: prevalence, association with lung cancer and mortality.BMC pulmonary medicine · 2017Article
- Challenges and Opportunities for Occupational Epidemiology in the Twenty-first Century.Current environmental health reports · 2017Review
- Retrospective Assessment of Occupational Exposures for the GENEVA Study of ALS among Military Veterans.Annals of work exposures and health · 2017Article
- Developing a job-exposure matrix with exposure uncertainty from expert elicitation and data modeling.Journal of exposure science & environmental epidemiology · 2017Article
- Assessment of occupational risks to extremely low frequency magnetic fields: Validation of an empirical non-expert approach.Preventive medicine reports · 2016Article
- Combining Decision Rules from Classification Tree Models and Expert Assessment to Estimate Occupational Exposure to Diesel Exhaust for a Case-Control Study.The Annals of occupational hygiene · 2016Article
- Wishful Thinking? Inside the Black Box of Exposure Assessment.The Annals of occupational hygiene · 2016Article
- Modeling groundwater nitrate concentrations in private wells in Iowa.The Science of the total environment · 2015Article
- Using hierarchical cluster models to systematically identify groups of jobs with similar occupational questionnaire response patterns to assist rule-based expert exposure assessment in population-based studies.The Annals of occupational hygiene · 2015Article
- Comparison of ordinal and nominal classification trees to predict ordinal expert-based occupational exposure estimates in a case-control study.The Annals of occupational hygiene · 2015Article
- Systematically extracting metal- and solvent-related occupational information from free-text responses to lifetime occupational history questionnaires.The Annals of occupational hygiene · 2014Article
- Comparison of algorithm-based estimates of occupational diesel exhaust exposure to those of multiple independent raters in a population-based case-control study.The Annals of occupational hygiene · 2013Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
14 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectivesEvaluating occupational exposures in population-based case-control studies often requires exposure assessors to review each study participant's reported occupational information job-by-job to derive exposure estimates. Although such assessments likely have underlying decision rules, they usually lack transparency, are time consuming and have uncertain reliability and validity. We aimed to identify the underlying rules to enable documentation, review and future use of these expert-based exposure decisions.
methodsClassification and regression trees (CART, predictions from a single tree) and random forests (predictions from many trees) were used to identify the underlying rules from the questionnaire responses, and an expert's exposure assignments for occupational diesel exhaust exposure for several metrics: binary exposure probability and ordinal exposure probability, intensity and frequency. Data were split into training (n=10 488 jobs), testing (n=2247) and validation (n=2248) datasets.
resultsThe CART and random forest models' predictions agreed with 92-94% of the expert's binary probability assignments. For ordinal probability, intensity and frequency metrics, the two models extracted decision rules more successfully for unexposed and highly exposed jobs (86-90% and 57-85%, respectively) than for low or medium exposed jobs (7-71%).
conclusionsCART and random forest models extracted decision rules and accurately predicted an expert's exposure decisions for the majority of jobs, and identified questionnaire response patterns that would require further expert review if the rules were applied to other jobs in the same or different study. This approach makes the exposure assessment process in case-control studies more transparent, and creates a mechanism to efficiently replicate exposure decisions in future studies.
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