Fuzzy logic and risk estimators

Abstract

Epidemiology is concerned with the identification of risk factors for diseases. This process relies on the definition and estimation of measures of association between a putative risk factor and its putative outcome. In order to achieve this end, several measures of association (Kleinbaum et al., 1982) are commonly used, namely the risk ratio (RR), the risk difference (RD), the attributable risk (RA), the odds ratio (OR) and the hazard rate ratio (HR). Some of these measures were introduced in chapter 3 and we revisit their definitions at the beginning of this chapter. Often, the causal pathway between risk factors and disease outcome is translated into statistical models and the measures of association of interest can be estimated as functions of the model parameters. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.