The phrase "as a decent proxy" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when discussing a substitute or representative that is reasonably reliable for a particular purpose or context.
Example: "While the survey results are not perfect, they serve as a decent proxy for understanding public opinion on the issue."
Alternatives: "as a reasonable substitute" or "as a fair representation".
Going to church, of course, is not the same as religiosity, but it serves as a decent proxy, Gallup argues: religion likely plays a more significant day-to-day role for someone who attends church weekly.
Yet despite them, and for whatever reason, GDP generally serves as a decent proxy for economic performance.
That's hard to gauge with technology, but in some ways your social connections serve as a decent proxy — Abrams says he's very interested in technology and entrepreneurship, and only casually interested in politics, and that's reflected in who he follows.
Fortunately, expected heterozygosity can serve as a decent proxy of the informativeness [25], [29], [30].
These markers were chosen mainly in consideration of their heterozygosities (Table 1) documented in the ABI panel guide, since expected heterozygosity can serve as a decent proxy of informativeness of these markers [25], [29] and using more informative markers can decrease the number of markers required to be genotyped [25], [29], [30].
Every quarter we keep track of the combined advertising revenues of the four largest Web advertising companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL), which together represent the lion's share of all online advertising revenues and is a decent proxy for the market as a whole.
That allows a look at how G-rated pictures, a decent proxy for children's films, perform at the box office: As it turns out, G-rated films, on average, book domestic box office returns that are about 2.4 times production budget and global box office returns that are about 5.3 times budget.
Tallying up their online advertising revenues provides a decent proxy for the health of the overall online advertising industry as a whole, since they represent a majority of those revenues.
Seismologists know that how long an earthquake lasts is a decent proxy for its magnitude.
Religious census figures provide a decent proxy for the numbers that sustain both clubs: in 2001, less than 18% of the population of Scotland identified as being Roman Catholic.
These are early data, but we suspect this is a decent proxy for what will happen inside an organization over time.
