background: confounding can be thought of as mixing the effect of exposure on the risk of disease with a third factor which distorts the measure of association such as risk ratio or odds ratio. this bias arises because of complex functional relationship of confounder with both exposure and disease (outcome). in this article, we provided a conceptual framework review of confounding issues in epi...

background: several studies have shown that attentional bias plays a role in the beginning, persistence and relapse of substance abuse disorder. therefore, identifying the factors related to attentional bias in substance abusers is important. in so doing, the present study was aimed at examining the relationship between attentional bias, anxiety sensitivity and metacognitive beliefs in substanc...

T h e translation of citizen votes into legislative seats is of central importance in democratic electoral systems. It has been a longstanding concern among scholars in political science and in numerous other disciplines. Throughout this literature, two fundamental tenets of democratic theory, partisan bias and democratic representation, have often been confused. W e develop a general statistic...

The term \bias" is widely used|and with diierent meanings|in the elds of machine learning and statistics. This paper clariies the uses of this term and shows how to measure and visualize the statistical bias and variance of learning algorithms. Statistical bias and variance can be applied to diagnose problems with machine learning bias, and the paper shows four examples of this. Finally, the pa...

Publication and other forms of selection biases pose a threat to the validity of meta-analysis. Funnel plots are usually used to detect such biases; asymmetrical plots are interpreted to suggest that biases are present. Using 198 published meta-analyses, we demonstrate that the shape of a funnel plot is largely determined by the arbitrary choice of the method to construct the plot. When a diffe...