topic Re: Odds ratio and Units in Statistical Procedures

Odds ratio and Units

Mathis1 — Fri, 24 Jul 2020 19:39:24 GMT

Hi,

Here is an excerpt of a traning quizz for the sas certification:

Answer A seems more correct to me. What do you think ?

Re: Odds ratio and Units

ballardw — Fri, 24 Jul 2020 20:09:48 GMT

I think that you have skipped on the description provided.

Are the values of the salary in dollar amounts: $102,454.18 or in thousands such as 102 for $102,000?

From the answer I suspect that salary was provided in thousands but you skipped any description actually provided of the input data set. Potentially bits in the code might also address this issue but without code can't say for sure.

You need need to know the units that a variable is collected in to apply the interpretation correctly.

Re: Odds ratio and Units

Mathis1 — Fri, 24 Jul 2020 20:19:38 GMT

Unfortunately the quizz doesn't provide any extra information... Maybe the salary is given in thousand of dollars indeed.

Re: Odds ratio and Units

Reeza — Fri, 24 Jul 2020 21:21:57 GMT

Where did you find this question?

Re: Odds ratio and Units

ballardw — Fri, 24 Jul 2020 21:28:12 GMT

One suspects that there is an introduction that describes the data set and then the set is used for multiple questions. The introduction could be many questions previously.

If there is no such description anywhere I would hope that you are not spending any money on this practice quiz as they don't know how to present information needed to answer questions.

Re: Odds ratio and Units

FreelanceReinh — Sat, 25 Jul 2020 15:07:18 GMT

@Mathis1 wrote:
Unfortunately the quizz doesn't provide any extra information... Maybe the salary is given in thousand of dollars indeed.

Hi @Mathis1,

Given this odds ratio (1.142) and the alternative of 1 $ or 1000 $ for the unit of the salary variable, you can virtually rule out the possibility of 1 $ with common sense: Assuming monthly or yearly salaries, differences between two values in a realistic dataset will likely be several hundred dollars or more, say, 500 $ for example. However, an odds ratio of 1.142**500 > 5E28 is obviously nonsensical -- regardless of the "event" in question.