Related papers: On the Individual Surrogate Paradox
Objectives: Surrogate endpoints, used to substitute for and predict final clinical outcomes, are increasingly being used to support submissions to health technology assessment agencies. The increase in use of surrogate endpoints has been…
Assessing causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounding is a challenging problem. Existing studies leveraged proxy variables or multiple treatments to adjust for the confounding bias. In particular, the latter approach attributes…
Surrogate markers are often employed in clinical trials to replace primary outcomes that may be difficult, expensive, or time-consuming to measure directly. These markers can accelerate the evaluation of new treatments, provided they…
Researchers are often interested in treatment effects on outcomes that are only defined conditional on a post-treatment event status. For example, in a study of the effect of different cancer treatments on quality of life at end of…
Triple difference designs have become increasingly popular in empirical economics. The advantage of a triple difference design is that, within a treatment group, it allows for another subgroup of the population -- potentially less impacted…
Treatment effect heterogeneity occurs when individual characteristics influence the effect of a treatment. We propose a novel approach that combines prognostic score matching and conditional inference trees to characterize effect…
We present a new machine learning approach to estimate personalized treatment effects in the classical potential outcomes framework with binary outcomes. To overcome the problem that both treatment and control outcomes for the same unit are…
Policy makers typically face the problem of wanting to estimate the long-term effects of novel treatments, while only having historical data of older treatment options. We assume access to a long-term dataset where only past treatments were…
In many empirical settings, directly observing a treatment variable may be infeasible although an error-prone surrogate measurement of the latter will often be available. Causal inference based solely on the surrogate measurement is…
Randomized trials typically estimate average relative treatment effects, but decisions on the benefit of a treatment are possibly better informed by more individualized predictions of the absolute treatment effect. In case of a binary…
A recent cohort study revealed a positive correlate between major structural birth defects in infants and a certain medication taken by pregnant women. To draw valid causal inference, an outstanding problem to overcome was the missing birth…
Binary treatments are often ex-post aggregates of multiple treatments or can be disaggregated into multiple treatment versions. Thus, effects can be heterogeneous due to either effect or treatment heterogeneity. We propose a decomposition…
Candidate binary endpoints are often considered as surrogates for time-to-event (TTE) clinical endpoints, primarily because they can be assessed at earlier time points. To be submitted for regulatory approval candidate binary endpoints need…
Treatment effect heterogeneity is of a great concern when evaluating policy impact: "is the treatment Pareto-improving?", "what is the proportion of people who are better off under the treatment?", etc. However, even in the simple case of a…
The causal effect of a treatment can vary from person to person based on their individual characteristics and predispositions. Mining for patterns of individual-level effect differences, a problem known as heterogeneous treatment effect…
Conditional effect estimation has great scientific and policy importance because interventions may impact subjects differently depending on their characteristics. Most research has focused on estimating the conditional average treatment…
This paper develops a nonparametric model that represents how sequences of outcomes and treatment choices influence one another in a dynamic manner. In this setting, we are interested in identifying the average outcome for individuals in…
The well-known Simpson's Paradox, or Yule-Simpson Effect, in statistics is often illustrated by the following thought experiment: A drug may be found in a trial to increase the survival rate for both men and women, but decrease the rate for…
This paper estimates individual treatment effects in a triangular model with binary--valued endogenous treatments. Following the identification strategy established in Vuong and Xu (2014), we propose a two--stage estimation approach. First,…
The use of valid surrogate endpoints is an important stake in clinical research to help reduce both the duration and cost of a clinical trial and speed up the evaluation of interesting treatments. Several methods have been proposed in the…