The phrase "a plausible proxy for" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when discussing a substitute or stand-in that is reasonable or believable in representing something else.
Example: "In this study, we consider the average income as a plausible proxy for overall economic well-being in the region."
Alternatives: "a reasonable substitute for" or "a credible stand-in for".
The point of such experiments is that an animal's ability to discriminate between different kinds of art is a plausible proxy for how complex and sophisticated its vision is.
As described above, several groups [22], [23], [31] have suggested that rotational stiffness K is a plausible proxy for the distance d between the whisker base and the point of object contact.
Finding no effect of phenotype (data not shown), we opted to characterize this variable by the number of organ systems affected, as a plausible proxy for severity.
The population enumerated in the area surrounding each monitored well provides a plausible proxy for sources such as latrines because population and latrine density are closely related throughout rural Bangladesh.
These indices would appear to be both internally consistent and plausible proxies for the underlying process es -of-care which, in concert with process es -of-caretics, determine the shaprocess es -of-carer descriptor hazard of discharge.
It measures, in other words, the gap between poor people and the local typical household.* It may be a proxy for how plausible it would be for a girl from a low-income household to rise into the middle class.
A letter is a proxy for your self.
Because of the presence in our phylogeny of a monophyletic group conformed by the five lemur malarial lineages, we were able to use the colonization patterns of terrestrial vertebrates in Madagascar as a proxy for biologically plausible time estimates, since the introduction of malaria into lemurs could not have happened after the last terrestrial mammal colonization event (~20 Mya) [ 25, 26].
