English
Related papers

Related papers: Sensitivity analysis using bias functions for stud…

200 papers

Causal inference, especially in observational studies, relies on untestable assumptions about the true data-generating process. Sensitivity analysis helps us determine how robust our conclusions are when we alter these underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Nikita Dhawan , Daniel Shen , Leonardo Cotta , Chris J. Maddison

To generalize inferences from a randomized trial to the target population of all trial-eligible individuals, investigators can use nested trial designs, where the randomized individuals are nested within a cohort of trial-eligible…

We present methods for causally interpretable meta-analyses that combine information from multiple randomized trials to estimate potential (counterfactual) outcome means and average treatment effects in a target population. We consider…

In observational studies, causal inference relies on several key identifying assumptions. One identifiability condition is the positivity assumption, which requires the probability of treatment be bounded away from 0 and 1. That is, for…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-02-21 Yaqian Zhu , Nandita Mitra , Jason Roy

When epidemiologic studies are conducted in a subset of the population, selection bias can threaten the validity of causal inference. This bias can occur whether or not that selected population is the target population, and can occur even…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-06-07 Louisa H. Smith , Tyler J. VanderWeele

In prior work we have introduced an asymptotic threshold of sufficient randomness for causal inference from observational data. In this paper we extend that prior work in three main ways. First, we show how to empirically estimate a lower…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-09-07 Brian Knaeble , Braxton Osting , Placede Tshiaba

Comparative effectiveness evidence from randomized trials may not be directly generalizable to a target population of substantive interest when, as in most cases, trial participants are not randomly sampled from the target population.…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-04-12 Fan Li , Ashley L. Buchanan , Stephen R. Cole

When extending inferences from a randomized trial to a new target population, the transportability condition for conditional difference effect measures is invoked to identify the marginal causal mean difference in the target population.…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-18 Guanbo Wang , Alexander Levis , Jon Steingrimsson , Issa Dahabreh

Generalization methods offer a powerful solution to one of the key drawbacks of randomized controlled trials (RCTs): their limited representativeness. By enabling the transport of treatment effect estimates to target populations subject to…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-05-20 Ahmed Boughdiri , Clément Berenfeld , Julie Josse , Erwan Scornet

Randomized clinical trials are the gold standard when estimating the average treatment effect. However, they are usually not a random sample from the real-world population because of the inclusion/exclusion rules. Meanwhile, observational…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-12-11 Kuan Jiang , Wenjie Hu , Shu Yang , Xinxing Lai , Xiaohua Zhou

A fundamental challenge in observational causal inference is that assumptions about unconfoundedness are not testable from data. Assessing sensitivity to such assumptions is therefore important in practice. Unfortunately, some existing…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-01-15 Alexander Franks , Alexander D'Amour , Avi Feller

This paper considers conducting inference about the effect of a treatment (or exposure) on an outcome of interest. In the ideal setting where treatment is assigned randomly, under certain assumptions the treatment effect is identifiable…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-03-06 Amy Richardson , Michael G. Hudgens , Peter B. Gilbert , Jason P. Fine

Sensitivity Analysis is a framework to assess how conclusions drawn from missing outcome data may be vulnerable to departures from untestable underlying assumptions. We extend the E-value, a popular metric for quantifying robustness of…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-08-31 Wu Xue , Abbas Zaidi

Transporting findings from a study population to a target population is central to evidence-based decision-making in real-world settings. Most existing methods require individual-level data from both populations to account for covariate…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-04 Ying Sheng , Yifei Sun , Chiung-Yu Huang

A standard assumption for causal inference from observational data is that one has measured a sufficiently rich set of covariates to ensure that within covariate strata, subjects are exchangeable across observed treatment values. Skepticism…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-09-24 Eric J Tchetgen Tchetgen , Andrew Ying , Yifan Cui , Xu Shi , Wang Miao

A key objective of decomposition analysis is to identify a factor (the 'mediator') contributing to disparities in an outcome between social groups. In decomposition analysis, a scholarly interest often centers on estimating how much the…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-05-27 Soojin Park , Suyeon Kang , Chioun Lee , Shujie Ma

We study hybrid control trials (HCTs), in which a randomized controlled trial (RCT) is augmented with external control patients. Existing approaches for HCTs typically assume conditional exchangeability of the concurrent and external…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-21 Alissa Gordon , Emilie Højbjerre-Frandsen , Alejandro Schuler

This paper provides a set of methods for quantifying the robustness of treatment effects estimated using the unconfoundedness assumption (also known as selection on observables or conditional independence). Specifically, we estimate and do…

Econometrics · Economics 2021-01-01 Matthew A. Masten , Alexandre Poirier , Linqi Zhang

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) yield internally valid causal effect estimates, but generalizing these results to target populations with different characteristics requires an untestable selection ignorability assumption: conditional on…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-31 Amir Asiaee , Samhita Pal , Jared D. Huling

Many trials are designed to collect outcomes at or around pre-specified times after randomization. If there is variability in the times when participants are actually assessed, this can pose a challenge to learning the effect of treatment,…