Related papers: Randomization for the susceptibility effect of an …
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.…
Causal inference with interference is a rapidly growing area. The literature has begun to relax the "no-interference" assumption that the treatment received by one individual does not affect the outcomes of other individuals. In this paper…
Causal identification of treatment effects for infectious disease outcomes in interconnected populations is challenging because infection outcomes may be transmissible to others, and treatment given to one individual may affect others'…
Estimation of social influence in networks can be substantially biased in observational studies due to homophily and network correlation in exposure to exogenous events. Randomized experiments, in which the researcher intervenes in the…
In randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of infectious disease interventions, it is well recognized that unmeasured individual heterogeneity at baseline can induce selection bias over time, thereby complicating the interpretation of the…
Cluster-randomized trials are often conducted to assess vaccine effects. Defining estimands of interest before conducting a trial is integral to the alignment between a study's objectives and the data to be collected and analyzed. This…
In order to meet regulatory approval, pharmaceutical companies often must demonstrate that new vaccines reduce the total risk of a post-infection outcome like transmission, symptomatic disease, severe illness, or death in randomized,…
Applied researchers are increasingly interested in whether and how treatment effects vary in randomized evaluations, especially variation not explained by observed covariates. We propose a model-free approach for testing for the presence of…
The risk ratio is a popular tool for summarizing the relationship between a binary covariate and outcome, even when outcomes may be dependent. Investigations of infectious disease outcomes in cohort studies of individuals embedded within…
In clinical studies, the risk of the primary (terminal) event may be modified by intermediate events, resulting in semicompeting risks. To study the treatment effect on the terminal event mediated by the intermediate event, researchers wish…
Consider the causal effect that one individual's treatment may have on another individual's outcome when the outcome is contagious, with specific application to the effect of vaccination on an infectious disease outcome. The effect of one…
In time-to-event settings, the presence of competing events complicates the definition of causal effects. Here we propose the new separable effects to study the causal effect of a treatment on an event of interest. The separable direct…
This paper shows how to use a randomized saturation experimental design to identify and estimate causal effects in the presence of spillovers--one person's treatment may affect another's outcome--and one-sided non-compliance--subjects can…
Some interventions may include important spillover or dissemination effects between study participants. For example, vaccines, cash transfers, and education programs may exert a causal effect on participants beyond those to whom individual…
In the context of having an instrumental variable, the standard practice in causal inference begins by targeting an effect of interest and proceeds by formulating assumptions enabling its identification. We turn this around by adhering to…
Whenever possible, the efficacy of a new treatment, such as a drug or behavioral intervention, is investigated by randomly assigning some individuals to a treatment condition and others to a control condition, and comparing the outcomes…
Randomization inference is a powerful tool in early phase vaccine trials when estimating the causal effect of a regimen against a placebo or another regimen. Randomization-based inference often focuses on testing either Fisher's sharp null…
In settings where interference between units is possible, we define the prevalence of indirect effects to be the number of units who are affected by the treatment of others. This quantity does not fully identify an indirect effect, but may…
Randomized experiments are widely used to estimate the causal effects of a proposed treatment in many areas of science, from medicine and healthcare to the physical and biological sciences, from the social sciences to engineering, to public…
Vaccination campaigns have both direct and indirect effects that act to control an infectious disease as it spreads through a population. Indirect effects arise when vaccinated individuals block disease transmission in any infection chains…