The Differential Geometry of Homogeneity Spaces Across Effect Scales

Abstract

If an effect measure is more homogeneous than others, then its value is more likely to be stable across different subgroups or subpopulations. Therefore, it is of great importance to find a more homogeneous effect measure that allows for transportability of research results. For a binary outcome, applied researchers often claim that the risk difference is more heterogeneous than the risk ratio or odds ratio, because they find, based on evidence from surveys of meta-analyses, that the null hypotheses of homogeneity are rejected more often for the risk difference than for the risk ratio and odds ratio. However, the evidence for these claims are far from satisfactory, because of different statistical powers of the homogeneity tests under different effect scales. For binary treatment, covariate and outcome, we theoretically quantify the homogeneity of different effect scales. Because when homogeneity holds the four outcome probabilities lie in a three dimensional sub-space of the four dimensional space, we can use results from differential geometry to compute the volumes of these three dimensional spaces to compare the relative homogeneity of the risk difference, risk ratio, and odds ratio. We demonstrate that the homogeneity space for the risk difference has the smallest volume, and the homogeneity space for the odds ratio has the largest volume, providing some further evidence for the previous claim that the risk difference is more heterogeneous than the risk ratio and odds ratio.