Addressing selection bias in the UK Biobank neurological imaging cohort

The UK Biobank is a national prospective study of half a million participants between the ages of 40 and 69 at the time of recruitment between 2006 and 2010, established to facilitate research on diseases of aging. The imaging cohort is a subset of UK Biobank participants who have agreed to undergo extensive additional imaging assessments. However, Fry et al. (2017) finds evidence of "healthy volunteer bias" in the UK Biobank - participants are less likely to smoke, be obese, consume alcohol daily than the target population of UK adults. Here we examine selection bias in the UK Biobank imaging cohort. We address two common misconceptions: first, that study size can compensate for bias in data collection, and second that selection bias does not affect estimates of associations, which are the primary interest of the UK Biobank. We introduce inverse probability weighting (IPW) as an approach commonly used in survey research that can be used to address selection bias in volunteer health studies like the UK Biobank. We discuss 6 such methods - five existing and one novel -, assess relative performance in simulation studies, and apply them to the UK Biobank imaging cohort. We find that our novel method, BART for predicting the probability of selection combined with raking, performs well relative to existing methods, and helps alleviate selection bias in the UK Biobank imaging cohort.