How Can the Similarity of the Case and Control Groups be Measured in Case-Control Studies?

摘要

Case-control studies rely on the fact, that individuals of the case group are similar to the individuals of the control group, except for the feature under investigation. However, measuring the similarity of the case group and the control group is a complex task. The widely applied statistical methods compare the distributions of the characteristic features individually or use dimensionality reduction methods to estimate the similarity of the two groups. In this paper, three complex dissimilarity measures are proposed for the evaluation of the degree of similarity of case and control groups. These measures take all characteristic features of individuals into consideration at the same time and do not apply dimensionality reduction. The applicability of the proposed measures is tested and presented by Monte Carlo simulations.