ALGAE Protocol: Errors and Limitations

An automated protocol for assigning early life exposures to longitudinal cohort studies

Errors and Limitations

by Kevin Garwood

Performance

ALGAE is driven off daily exposure records and for the later life analysis, we converted annual average exposures for each location into daily exposures that covered the same period. This significantly increased the amount of time the protocol needed to run. However, the reason why both early and later life analyses use daily exposure records is to simplify the code base. Whereas before ALGAE used daily exposures for the early life analysis and weighted annual average exposures for address periods in the later life analysis, now both analyses share exactly the same code for exposure calculations. This has provided a great benefit for simplifying testing.