ESTIMATING THE HEALTH EFFECTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL MIXTURES USING BAYESIAN SEMIPARAMETRIC REGRESSION AND SPARSITY INDUCING PRIORS

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Antonelli, Joseph; Mazumdar, Maitreyi; Bellinger, David; Christiani, David; Wright, Robert; Coull, Brent
• 署名单位: State University System of Florida; University of Florida; Harvard University; Harvard Medical School; Harvard University; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
• 刊物名称: ANNALS OF APPLIED STATISTICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1932-6157
• DOI: 10.1214/19-AOAS1307
• 发表日期: 2020
• 页码: 257-275
• 关键词: VARIABLE SELECTION; chemical-mixtures; regularization; exposure; Lasso

摘要

Humans are routinely exposed to mixtures of chemical and other environmental factors, making the quantification of health effects associated with environmental mixtures a critical goal for establishing environmental policy sufficiently protective of human health. The quantification of the effects of exposure to an environmental mixture poses several statistical challenges. It is often the case that exposure to multiple pollutants interact with each other to affect an outcome. Further, the exposure-response relationship between an outcome and some exposures, such as some metals, can exhibit complex, nonlinear forms, since some exposures can be beneficial and detrimental at different ranges of exposure. To estimate the health effects of complex mixtures, we propose a flexible Bayesian approach that allows exposures to interact with each other and have nonlinear relationships with the outcome. We induce sparsity using multivariate spike and slab priors to determine which exposures are associated with the outcome and which exposures interact with each other. The proposed approach is interpretable, as we can use the posterior probabilities of inclusion into the model to identify pollutants that interact with each other. We utilize our approach to study the impact of exposure to metals on child neurodevelopment in Bangladesh and find a nonlinear, interactive relationship between arsenic and manganese.