A simplified approach to estimating the distribution of occasionally-consumed dietary components, applied to alcohol intake.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Within-person variation in dietary records can lead to biased estimates of the distribution of food intake. Quantile estimation is especially relevant in the case of skewed distributions and in the estimation of under- or over-consumption. The analysis of the intake distributions of occasionally-consumed foods presents further challenges due to the high frequency of zero records. Two-part mixed-effects models account for excess-zeros, daily variation and correlation arising from repeated individual dietary records. In practice, the application of the two-part model with random effects involves Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. However, these can be time-consuming and the precision of MC estimates depends on the size of the simulated data which can hinder reproducibility of r

SUBMITTER: Chernova J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4930587 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature