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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lu, Yujing, Breheny, Patrick
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03531
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author Lu, Yujing
Breheny, Patrick
author_facet Lu, Yujing
Breheny, Patrick
contents Confounding can lead to spurious associations. Typically, one must observe confounders in order to adjust for them, but in high-dimensional settings, recent research has shown that it becomes possible to adjust even for unobserved confounders. The methods for carrying out these adjustments, however, have not been thoroughly investigated. In this study, we derive a confounding framework in which the signal, bias, and variability can be cleanly partitioned and quantified, thereby enabling simulations in which one varies the bias-to-signal ratio while holding the signal-to-noise ratio fixed. Using this construction, we demonstrate the impact of the amount and complexity of unobserved confounding on the performance of competing methods, including the LASSO, principal components LASSO (PC-LASSO), and penalized linear mixed models (PLMMs). We identify scenarios in which each method outperforms the others and find that overall, PLMM is the most robust approach.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_03531
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Penalized mixed models to adjust for batch effects and unobserved confounding in high dimensional regression
Lu, Yujing
Breheny, Patrick
Methodology
Confounding can lead to spurious associations. Typically, one must observe confounders in order to adjust for them, but in high-dimensional settings, recent research has shown that it becomes possible to adjust even for unobserved confounders. The methods for carrying out these adjustments, however, have not been thoroughly investigated. In this study, we derive a confounding framework in which the signal, bias, and variability can be cleanly partitioned and quantified, thereby enabling simulations in which one varies the bias-to-signal ratio while holding the signal-to-noise ratio fixed. Using this construction, we demonstrate the impact of the amount and complexity of unobserved confounding on the performance of competing methods, including the LASSO, principal components LASSO (PC-LASSO), and penalized linear mixed models (PLMMs). We identify scenarios in which each method outperforms the others and find that overall, PLMM is the most robust approach.
title Penalized mixed models to adjust for batch effects and unobserved confounding in high dimensional regression
topic Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03531