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Some considerations for excess zeroes in substance abuse research.

ABSTRACT: Count data collected in substance abuse research often come with an excess of "zeroes," which are typically handled using zero-inflated regression models. However, there is a need to consider the design aspects of those studies before using such a statistical model to ascertain the sources of zeroes.We sought to illustrate hurdle models as alternatives to zero-inflated models to validate a two-stage decision-making process in situations of "excess zeroes."We use data from a study of 45 cocaine-dependent subjects where the primary scientific question was to evaluate whether study participation influences drug-seeking behavior. The outcome, "the frequency (count) of cocaine use days per week," is bounded (ranging from 0 to 7). We fit and compare binomial, Poisson, negative binomial, and the hurdle version of these models to study the effect of gender, age, time, and study participation on cocaine use.The hurdle binomial model provides the best fit. Gender and time are not predictive of use. Higher odds of use versus no use are associated with age; however once use is experienced, odds of further use decrease with increase in age. Participation was associated with higher odds of no-cocaine use; once there is use, participation reduced the odds of further use.Age and study participation are significantly predictive of cocaine-use behavior.The two-stage decision process as modeled by a hurdle binomial model (appropriate for bounded count data with excess zeroes) provides interesting insights into the study of covariate effects on count responses of substance use, when all enrolled subjects are believed to be "at-risk" of use.

SUBMITTER: Bandyopadhyay D

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3297079 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Some considerations for excess zeroes in substance abuse research.

Bandyopadhyay Dipankar D DeSantis Stacia M SM Korte Jeffrey E JE Brady Kathleen T KT

The American journal of drug and alcohol abuse 20110901 5

<h4>Background</h4>Count data collected in substance abuse research often come with an excess of "zeroes," which are typically handled using zero-inflated regression models. However, there is a need to consider the design aspects of those studies before using such a statistical model to ascertain the sources of zeroes.<h4>Objectives</h4>We sought to illustrate hurdle models as alternatives to zero-inflated models to validate a two-stage decision-making process in situations of "excess zeroes."<h ...[more]

PMID: 21854280

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Project description:BackgroundWeb-based resources and social media platforms play an increasingly important role in health-related knowledge and experience sharing. There is a growing interest in the use of these novel data sources for epidemiological surveillance of substance use behaviors and trends.ObjectiveThe key aims were to describe the development and application of the drug abuse ontology (DAO) as a framework for analyzing web-based and social media data to inform public health and substance use research in the following areas: determining user knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors related to nonmedical use of buprenorphine and illicitly manufactured opioids through the analysis of web forum data Prescription Drug Abuse Online Surveillance; analyzing patterns and trends of cannabis product use in the context of evolving cannabis legalization policies in the United States through analysis of Twitter and web forum data (eDrugTrends); assessing trends in the availability of novel synthetic opioids through the analysis of cryptomarket data (eDarkTrends); and analyzing COVID-19 pandemic trends in social media data related to 13 states in the United States as per Mental Health America reports.MethodsThe domain and scope of the DAO were defined using competency questions from popular ontology methodology (101 ontology development). The 101 method includes determining the domain and scope of ontology, reusing existing knowledge, enumerating important terms in ontology, defining the classes, their properties and creating instances of the classes. The quality of the ontology was evaluated using a set of tools and best practices recognized by the semantic web community and the artificial intelligence community that engage in natural language processing.ResultsThe current version of the DAO comprises 315 classes, 31 relationships, and 814 instances among the classes. The ontology is flexible and can easily accommodate new concepts. The integration of the ontology with machine learning algorithms dramatically decreased the false alarm rate by adding external knowledge to the machine learning process. The ontology is recurrently updated to capture evolving concepts in different contexts and applied to analyze data related to social media and dark web marketplaces.ConclusionsThe DAO provides a powerful framework and a useful resource that can be expanded and adapted to a wide range of substance use and mental health domains to help advance big data analytics of web-based data for substance use epidemiology research.

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Some considerations for excess zeroes in substance abuse research.

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Some considerations for excess zeroes in substance abuse research.

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