Related papers: On the Individual Surrogate Paradox
Heterogeneous treatment effects are of major interest in economics. For example, a poverty reduction measure would be best evaluated by its effects on those who would be poor in the absence of the treatment, or by the share among the poor…
In statistical learning theory, convex surrogates of the 0-1 loss are highly preferred because of the computational and theoretical virtues that convexity brings in. This is of more importance if we consider smooth surrogates as witnessed…
Causal inference on multiple non-independent outcomes raises serious challenges, because multivariate techniques that properly account for the outcome's dependence structure need to be considered. We focus on the case of binary outcomes…
Recent years have seen a swell in methods that focus on estimating "individual treatment effects". These methods are often focused on the estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects under ignorability assumptions. This paper hopes to draw…
The gold standard in the treatment of ischaemic stroke is set by evidence from randomized controlled trials, based on simple descriptions of presumptively homogeneous populations. Yet the manifest complexity of the brain's functional,…
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…
Estimation of individual treatment effect in observational data is complicated due to the challenges of confounding and selection bias. A useful inferential framework to address this is the counterfactual (potential outcomes) model which…
We propose semi- and non-parametric methods to estimate conditional interventional effects in the setting of two discrete mediators whose causal ordering is unknown. Average interventional indirect effects have been shown to decompose an…
Observational data about human behavior is often heterogeneous, i.e., generated by subgroups within the population under study that vary in size and behavior. Heterogeneity predisposes analysis to Simpson's paradox, whereby the trends…
Suppose we have a binary treatment used to influence an outcome. Given data from an observational or controlled study, we wish to determine whether or not there exists some subset of observed covariates in which the treatment is more…
An individualized treatment rule (ITR) is a decision rule that recommends treatments for patients based on their individual feature variables. In many practices, the ideal ITR for the primary outcome is also expected to cause minimal harm…
In biomedical studies, estimating drug effects on chronic diseases requires a long follow-up period, which is difficult to meet in randomized clinical trials (RCTs). The use of a short-term surrogate to replace the long-term outcome for…
This paper investigates how certain relationship between observed and counterfactual distributions serves as an identifying condition for treatment effects when the treatment is endogenous, and shows that this condition holds in a range of…
Assessing the causal effects of interventions on ordinal outcomes is an important objective of many educational and behavioral studies. Under the potential outcomes framework, we can define causal effects as comparisons between the…
The aim of clinical effectiveness research using repositories of electronic health records is to identify what health interventions 'work best' in real-world settings. Since there are several reasons why the net benefit of intervention may…
One of the main tasks of causal inference is estimating well-defined causal parameters. One of the main causal parameters is the average causal effect (ACE) - the expected value of the individual level causal effects in the target…
Unobserved heterogeneous treatment effects have been emphasized in the recent policy evaluation literature (see e.g., Heckman and Vytlacil, 2005). This paper proposes a nonparametric test for unobserved heterogeneous treatment effects in a…
Trial level surrogates are useful tools for improving the speed and cost effectiveness of trials, but surrogates that have not been properly evaluated can cause misleading results. The evaluation procedure is often contextual and depends on…
This paper describes Simpson's paradox, and explains its serious implications for randomised control trials. In particular, we show that for any number of variables we can simulate the result of a controlled trial which uniformly points to…
In comparative effectiveness research, treated and control patients might have a different start of follow-up as treatment is often started later in the disease trajectory. This typically occurs when data from treated and controls are not…