Related papers: Bridging preference-based instrumental variable st…

Mendelian randomization (MR) is a widely-used method to estimate the causal relationship between a risk factor and disease. A fundamental part of any MR analysis is to choose appropriate genetic variants as instrumental variables.…

A fundamental limitation of causal inference in observational studies is that perceived evidence for an effect might instead be explained by factors not accounted for in the primary analysis. Methods for assessing the sensitivity of a…

In a cluster-randomized experiment, treatment is assigned to clusters of individual units of interest--households, classrooms, villages, etc.--instead of the units themselves. The number of clusters sampled and the number of units sampled…

The method of instrumental variables provides a fundamental and practical tool for causal inference in many empirical studies where unmeasured confounding between the treatments and the outcome is present. Modern data such as the genetical…

Instrumental Variables provide a way of addressing bias due to unmeasured confounding when estimating treatment effects using observational data. As instrument prescription preference of individual healthcare providers has been proposed.…

Comparative binary outcome data are of fundamental interest in statistics and are often pooled in meta-analyses. Here we examine the simplest case where for each study there are two patient groups and a binary event of interest, giving rise…

Inference for causal effects can benefit from the availability of an instrumental variable (IV) which, by definition, is associated with the given exposure, but not with the outcome of interest other than through a causal exposure effect.…

Randomized trials are viewed as the benchmark for assessing causal effects of treatments on outcomes of interest. Nonetheless, challenges such as measurement error can undermine the standard causal assumptions for randomized trials. In…

Instrumental variables (IVs) are widely used for estimating causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. Under the standard IV model, however, the average treatment effect (ATE) is only partially identifiable. To address this,…

Uncertainty in the estimation of the causal effect in observational studies is often due to unmeasured confounding, i.e., the presence of unobserved covariates linking treatments and outcomes. Instrumental Variables (IV) are commonly used…

In causal inference, encouragement designs (EDs) are widely used to analyze causal effects, when randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are impractical or compliance to treatment cannot be perfectly enforced. Unlike RCTs, which directly…

In semi-logarithmic regressions, treatment coefficients are often interpreted as approximations of the average treatment effect (ATE) in percentage points. This paper highlights the overlooked bias of this approximation under treatment…

Variable selection for optimal treatment regime in a clinical trial or an observational study is getting more attention. Most existing variable selection techniques focused on selecting variables that are important for prediction, therefore…

The micro-randomized trial (MRT) is a sequential randomized experimental design to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of mobile health (mHealth) intervention components that may be delivered at hundreds or thousands of decision points.…

The most widely discussed methods for estimating the Average Causal Effect/Average Treatment Effect are those for intervention in discrete binary variables whose value represents intervention/non-intervention groups. On the other hand,…

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…

When drawing causal inferences about the effects of multiple treatments on clustered survival outcomes using observational data, we need to address implications of the multilevel data structure, multiple treatments, censoring and unmeasured…

Estimating the causal effect of a treatment or health policy with observational data can be challenging due to an imbalance of and a lack of overlap between treated and control covariate distributions. In the presence of limited overlap,…

This article proposes different tests for treatment effect heterogeneity when the outcome of interest, typically a duration variable, may be right-censored. The proposed tests study whether a policy 1) has zero distributional (average)…

It is common in instrumental variable studies for instrument values to be missing, for example when the instrument is a genetic test in Mendelian randomization studies. In this paper we discuss two apparent paradoxes that arise in so-called…