A common exposure variable, like BMI, which generates high interest and numerous plausible cutoffs, emphasizes how much useful information is lost when a single cutoff is presented.
Specifically, we: 1) describe different strategies that are commonly used to select cutoffs for continuous exposure variables; 2) illustrate the potential effects of changing the cutoff on ORs and standard error; and 3) (re propose a method for summarizing the results of analyses across plausible cutoffs.
Instead we selected cutoffs which are plausible (default cutoff of the geno2pheno method and the proposed sensitivity limit of the phenotypic assay).
We recommend using the PPV, the NNE and/or the estimated rate of alerts combined with sensitivity to evaluate each of the plausible score cutoff values.
Therefore, if the p-values from our Hotelling's T-test are several orders of magnitudes smaller than 0.05, our choice of 0.05 compared to other plausible significance cutoffs is irrelevant.
Participating children were classified according to adapted Goldberg cutoffs: underreports, plausible energy reports and overreports.
Orshansky also has performed studies that, with certain perfectly plausible statistical adjustments, show the poverty cutoff could have been set much higher initially, meaning that today millions more would be considered poor.
This was calculated to classify all individuals with underreported energy intake, plausible reported energy intake and overreported energy intake according to adapted Goldberg cutoffs [ 36].
Though cutoffs for trimming large values can make up for the extreme values, it is not biologically plausible to do so and may affect model parameter estimation and regulatory pattern inference.
Furthermore, it is scientifically plausible that vitD levels needed to optimize breast health and response to chemotherapy have no relationship with the IOM cutoffs, since these were based on bone events.
