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Decreased Susceptibility of Marginal Odds Ratios to Finite-sample Bias

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Photo: Pixabay / geralt

Parameters representing adjusted treatment effects may be defined marginally or conditionally on covariates. The choice between a marginal or covariate-conditional parameter should be driven by the study question. However, an unappreciated benefit of marginal estimators is a reduction in susceptibility to finite-sample bias relative to the unpenalized maximum likelihood estimator of the covariate-conditional odds ratio (OR).