We thus applied profile regression with a different meaningful categorisation of the exposure information (the new discretisation is summarised in Additional file 1: Table S1).
Different categorisation schemes were shown to have a substantial impact on study results, particularly for the antibiotic exposures associated with resistance.
Because the studies used different physical activity measures in their tests for trend (e.g., energy expended, intensity, frequency, or duration), as well as different categorisation schemes, we did not conduct a formal meta-analysis of trend across studies.
The impact of using different categorisation methods on identifying risk factors for resistance is unknown.
Different categorisation of the groups of bundle completion did not alter the results.
However, the variation in the adjusted survival estimates among the different categorisation schemes was strongly reduced for all cancer sites.
This means that one might obtain different categorisation proposals for the same predictor, if one were to consider different outcomes or different modelling approaches.
The definition of nasal-type is confusing, which resulted in different categorisation by various institutions (Kern et al, 1992; Wong et al, 1992; Peiper, 1993; Nakamura et al, 1995; Jaffe et al, 1996, 1999; Kobashi et al, 1996; Chan et al, 1997; Bekkenk et al, 2004; Ko et al, 2004).
Similarly, the three most consistently analysed clauses (excluding the clause with 100% consistency) included a mix of different categorisations and did not follow an identifiable trend.
We recognise the potential value in treating reward size in a continuous manner and testing different categorisations.
