Related papers: Causal Effects of Prenatal Drug Exposure on Birth …

Background: Researchers typically identify pregnancies in healthcare data based on observed outcomes (e.g., delivery). This outcome-based approach misses pregnancies that received prenatal care but whose outcomes were not recorded (e.g.,…

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cautioned that prenatal exposure to anesthetic drugs during the third trimester may have neurotoxic effects; however, there is limited clinical evidence available to substantiate this…

In both observational studies and randomized trials, post-treatment events such as dropout, nonadherence, and truncation by death occur frequently. In some studies, conditioning on post-treatment variables is a deliberate strategy to…

In experimental and observational data settings, researchers often have limited knowledge of the reasons for missing outcomes. To address this uncertainty, we propose bounds on causal effects for missing outcomes, accommodating the scenario…

Inferring causal effects of treatments is a central goal in many disciplines. The potential outcomes framework is a main statistical approach to causal inference, in which a causal effect is defined as a comparison of the potential outcomes…

We show that causal effects can be identified when there is bunching in the distribution of a continuous treatment variable, without imposing any parametric assumptions. This yields a new nonparametric method for overcoming selection bias…

In many real-world causal inference applications, the primary outcomes (labels) are often partially missing, especially if they are expensive or difficult to collect. If the missingness depends on covariates (i.e., missingness is not…

As a solution to methodologic challenges inherent to estimating causal effects of exposures in early pregnancy, we suggest emulating a target trial using a treatment decision design, wherein time zero is centered around clinical landmarks…

Causal inference from observational data can be viewed as a missing data problem arising from a hypothetical population-scale randomized trial matched to the observational study. This links a target trial protocol with a corresponding…

Missing exposure information is a very common feature of many observational studies. Here we study identifiability and efficient estimation of causal effects on vector outcomes, in such cases where treatment is unconfounded but partially…

Inferring causal relationships from observational data is often challenging due to endogeneity. This paper provides new identification results for causal effects of discrete, ordered and continuous treatments using multiple binary…

Missing data are ubiquitous in public health research. When estimating causal effects, there are well-established methods to address bias to due missing outcomes. Commonly, causal estimands are defined under hypothetical interventions to…

Estimating the long-term effects of treatments is of interest in many fields. A common challenge in estimating such treatment effects is that long-term outcomes are unobserved in the time frame needed to make policy decisions. One approach…

Measurement error can often be harmful when estimating causal effects. Two scenarios in which this is the case are in the estimation of (a) the average treatment effect when confounders are measured with error and (b) the natural indirect…

Standard methods for estimating average causal effects require complete observations of the exposure and confounders. In observational studies, however, missing data are ubiquitous. Motivated by a study on the effect of prescription opioids…

This study demonstrates the existence of a testable condition for the identification of the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in observational data, which relies on two sets of variables: observed covariates to be controlled for…

Perinatal epidemiology often aims to evaluate exposures on infant outcomes. When the exposure affects the composition of people who give birth to live infants (e.g., by affecting fertility, behavior, or birth outcomes), this "live birth…

This paper provides a nonparametric framework for causal inference with categorical outcomes under binary treatment and binary instrument settings. I decompose the observed joint probability of outcomes and treatment into marginal…

Identifying covariates that modify treatment effects is a central problem in causal inference. Yet existing data-adaptive procedures do not provide finite-sample control over the expected number of false discoveries, risking spurious…

In estimating the causal effect of a continuous exposure or treatment, it is important to control for all confounding factors. However, most existing methods require parametric specification for how control variables influence the outcome…