07: A Biological Additivity and Interaction Model to Bridge Epidemiology and Toxicology

Music City Center 

Modeling the effects from mixtures of exposures is of interest to both epidemiology and toxicology. Due to differences in data and settings, mutually exclusive methods have been developed across the two fields. We take the opportunity to develop a new methodology that borrows advantages from both fields and allows for knowledge to flow across domains. We develop a technique called BAI-LVM that accounts for biological additivity in a mixture response as modeled in toxicology. We show how a straightforward statistical model does not account for biological additivity and how various models from epidemiology relate to each other regarding biological assumptions. Our method produces latent individual dose response curves, providing an easy way to inject prior knowledge from toxicology. The HAND model for biological additivity model is implemented given a consensus that it is biologically most plausible. Simulation studies demonstrate the performance across different scenarios and an application to epidemiological data is provided.

biological additivity

epidemiology

toxicology

Bayesian

dose response