English
Related papers

Related papers: Bridging observational studies and randomized expe…

200 papers

Humans are exposed to complex mixtures of environmental pollutants rather than single chemicals, necessitating methods to quantify the health effects of such mixtures. Research on environmental mixtures provides insights into realistic…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-09 Aaron Sonabend , Jiangshan Zhang , Edgar Castro , Joel Schwartz , Brent A. Coull , Junwei Lu

Understanding the factors that trigger or prevent undesirable health outcomes across patient subpopulations is essential for designing targeted interventions. While randomized controlled trials and expert-led patient interviews are standard…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Shishir Adhikari , Guido Muscioni , Mark Shapiro , Plamen Petrov , Elena Zheleva

The possibility of unmeasured confounding is one of the main limitations for causal inference from observational studies. There are different methods for (partially) empirically assessing the plausibility of unconfoundedness. However, most…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-28 Fernando Pires Hartwig , Kate Tilling , George Davey Smith

We develop new matching estimators for estimating causal quantile exposure-response functions and quantile exposure effects with continuous treatments. We provide identification results for the parameters of interest and establish the…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-08-04 Luca Merlo , Francesca Dominici , Lea Petrella , Nicola Salvati , Xiao Wu

Estimating the effect of a change in a particular risk factor and a chronic disease requires information on the risk factor from two time points; the enrolment and the first follow-up. When using observational data to study the effect of…

Technological advancements in the field of mobile devices and wearable sensors have helped overcome obstacles in the delivery of care, making it possible to deliver behavioral treatments anytime and anywhere. Increasingly the delivery of…

Applications · Statistics 2017-11-13 Walter Dempsey , Peng Liao , Santosh Kumar , Susan A. Murphy

This paper presents a novel nonlinear regression model for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects from observational data, geared specifically towards situations with small effect sizes, heterogeneous effects, and strong confounding.…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-11-14 P. Richard Hahn , Jared S. Murray , Carlos Carvalho

Researchers are often challenged with assessing the impact of an intervention on an outcome of interest in situations where the intervention is non-randomised, the intervention is only applied to one or few units, the intervention is…

In this paper we present a data-adaptive estimation procedure for estimation of average treatment effects in a time-to-event setting based on generalized random forests. In these kinds of settings, the definition of causal effect parameters…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-04-28 Helene C. W. Rytgaard , Claus T. Ekstrøm , Lars V. Kessing , Thomas A. Gerds

Causal inference is a fundamental research topic for discovering the cause-effect relationships in many disciplines. However, not all algorithms are equally well-suited for a given dataset. For instance, some approaches may only be able to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-11 Zhipeng Ma , Marco Kemmerling , Daniel Buschmann , Chrismarie Enslin , Daniel Lütticke , Robert H. Schmitt

Diet plays a crucial role in health, and understanding the causal effects of dietary patterns is essential for informing public health policy and personalized nutrition strategies. However, causal inference in nutritional epidemiology faces…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-26 Dafne Zorzetto , Zizhao Xie , Julian Stamp , Arman Oganisian , Roberta De Vito

Epidemiologists often wish to estimate quantities that are easy to communicate and correspond to the results of realistic public health scenarios. Methods from causal inference can answer these questions. We adopt the language of potential…

Defining and identifying causal intervention effects for transmissible infectious disease outcomes is challenging because a treatment -- such as a vaccine -- given to one individual may affect the infection outcomes of others.…

Applications · Statistics 2019-12-11 Xiaoxuan Cai , Wen Wei Loh , Forrest W. Crawford

In most real-world systems units are interconnected and can be represented as networks consisting of nodes and edges. For instance, in social systems individuals can have social ties, family or financial relationships. In settings where…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-07-31 Laura Forastiere , Fabrizia Mealli , Albert Wu , Edoardo Airoldi

A treatment policy defines when and what treatments are applied to affect some outcome of interest. Data-driven decision-making requires the ability to predict what happens if a policy is changed. Existing methods that predict how the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Çağlar Hızlı , ST John , Anne Juuti , Tuure Saarinen , Kirsi Pietiläinen , Pekka Marttinen

Motivated by environmental policy questions, we address the challenges of estimation, change point detection, and uncertainty quantification of a causal exposure-response function (CERF). Under a potential outcome framework, the CERF…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-27 Boyu Ren , Xiao Wu , Danielle Braun , Natesh Pillai , Francesca Dominici

Both cluster randomized trials and quasi-experimental designs are used to evaluate the impact of health and social policies and interventions. Stepped-wedge cluster randomized trials randomize a staggered adoption approach, while recent…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-15 Haidong Lu , Gregg S. Gonsalves , Fan Li , Guanyu Tong , Lee Kennedy-Shaffer

Ordered categorical data frequently arise in the analysis of biomedical, agricultural, and social sciences data. The logistic regression model is attractive in analyzing ordered categorical data because of its use in interpretation of a…

Applications · Statistics 2016-01-08 Ali Reza Fotouhi , Theresa Mulder

In the absence of randomized controlled and natural experiments, it is necessary to balance the distributions of (observable) covariates of the treated and control groups in order to obtain an unbiased estimate of a causal effect of…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-02 Martin Cousineau , Vedat Verter , Susan A. Murphy , Joelle Pineau

Estimating causal effects from observational data is not always possible due to confounding. Identifying a set of appropriate covariates (adjustment set) and adjusting for their influence can remove confounding bias; however, such a set is…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-11-19 Sofia Triantafillou , Gregory Cooper