A0916
Title: Exploration, confirmation, and replication: A two team cross-screening
Authors: Samrat Roy - Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (India) [presenting]
Abstract: The long-term consequences of unwanted pregnancies carried to term on mothers have not been much explored. Data is used from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study(WLS), and a novel method is proposed, namely two-team cross-screening, to study the possible effects of unwanted pregnancies carried to term on various aspects of mothers' later-life mental health, physical health, economic well-being, and life satisfaction. The method, unlike existing approaches to observational studies, enables the investigators to perform exploratory data analysis, confirmatory data analysis, and replication in the same study. This is a valuable property when there is only a single data set available with unique strengths to perform exploratory, confirmatory, and replication analysis. In two-team cross-screening, the investigators split themselves into two teams, and the data is split as well according to a meaningful covariate. Each team then performs exploratory data analysis on its part of the data to design an analysis plan for the other part of the data. The complete freedom of the teams in designing the analysis has the potential to generate new unanticipated hypotheses in addition to a prefixed set of hypotheses. Moreover, only the hypotheses that looked promising in the data each team explored are forwarded for analysis (thus alleviating the multiple testing problem). These advantages are demonstrated in the study of the effects of unwanted pregnancies on mothers' later life outcomes
