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Inferring the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in an observational study requires adjusting for observed baseline confounders to avoid bias. However, adjusting for all observed baseline covariates, when only a subset are…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-02-04 Wen Wei Loh , Stijn Vansteelandt

A key condition for obtaining reliable estimates of the causal effect of a treatment is overlap (a.k.a. positivity): the distributions of the features used to perform causal adjustment cannot be too different in the treated and control…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-04-14 Alexander D'Amour , Alexander Franks

In many scientific fields such as biology, psychology and sociology, there is an increasing interest in estimating the causal effect of a matrix exposure on an outcome. Covariate balancing is crucial in causal inference and both exact…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-03-14 Juan Chen , Yingchun Zhou

In observational studies, weighting methods that directly optimize the balance between treatment and covariates have received much attention lately; however these have mainly focused on binary treatments. Inspired by domain adaptation, we…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-02-27 Guillaume Martinet

Studying causal effects of continuous treatments is important for gaining a deeper understanding of many interventions, policies, or medications, yet researchers are often left with observational studies for doing so. In the observational…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-06-16 Jared D. Huling , Noah Greifer , Guanhua Chen

Balancing influential covariates is crucial for valid treatment comparisons in clinical studies. While covariate-adaptive randomization is commonly used to achieve balance, its performance can be inadequate when the number of baseline…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-12-30 Ziqing Guo , Yang Liu , Lucy Xia

The survey experiment is widely used in economics and social sciences to evaluate the effects of treatments or programs. In a standard population-based survey experiment, the experimenter randomly draws experimental units from a target…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-11 Pengfei Tian , Jiyang Ren , Yingying Ma

Propensity score plays a central role in causal inference, but its use is not limited to causal comparisons. As a covariate balancing tool, propensity score can be used for controlled descriptive comparisons between groups whose memberships…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-09-09 Fan Li , Fan Li

We address estimation of intervention effects in experimental designs in which (a) interventions are assigned at the cluster level; (b) clusters are selected to form pairs, matched on observed characteristics; and (c) intervention is…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-11-24 Zhenke Wu , Constantine E. Frangakis , Thomas A. Louis , Daniel O. Scharfstein

Randomized clinical trials (RCTs) are ideal for estimating causal effects, because the distributions of background covariates are similar in expectation across treatment groups. When estimating causal effects using observational data,…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-02-27 Anthony D. Scotina , Roee Gutman

Causal inference analyses often use existing observational data, which in many cases has some clustering of individuals. In this paper we discuss propensity score weighting methods in a multilevel setting where within clusters individuals…

Applications · Statistics 2020-12-24 Youjin Lee , Trang Q. Nguyen , Elizabeth A. Stuart

Marginal structural models have been increasingly used by analysts in recent years to account for confounding bias in studies with time-varying treatments. The parameters of these models are often estimated using inverse probability of…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-03-14 David Adenyo , Jason R. Guertin , Bernard Candas , Caroline Sirois , Denis Talbot

We investigate the estimation of subgroup treatment effects with observational data. Existing propensity score matching and weighting methods are mostly developed for estimating overall treatment effect. Although the true propensity score…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-07-20 Jing Dong , Junni L Zhang , Fan Li

In comparative studies, such as in causal inference and clinical trials, balancing important covariates is often one of the most important concerns for both efficient and credible comparison. However, chance imbalance still exists in many…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-07-30 Yichen Qin , Yang Li , Wei Ma , Feifang Hu

A key methodological challenge in observational studies with interference between units is twofold: (1) each unit's outcome may depend on many others' treatments, and (2) treatment assignments may exhibit complex dependencies across units.…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-17 Souhardya Sengupta , Kosuke Imai , Georgia Papadogeorgou

Observational studies can play a useful role in assessing the comparative effectiveness of competing treatments. In a clinical trial the randomization of participants to treatment and control groups generally results in well-balanced groups…

Estimating treatment effects for subgroups defined by post-treatment behavior (i.e., estimating causal effects in a principal stratification framework) can be technically challenging and heavily reliant on strong assumptions. We investigate…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-08-17 Luke Miratrix , Jane Furey , Avi Feller , Todd Grindal , Lindsay C. Page

Survival outcomes are common in comparative effectiveness studies and require unique handling because they are usually incompletely observed due to right-censoring. A ``once for all'' approach for causal inference with survival outcomes…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-21 Shuxi Zeng , Fan Li , Liangyuan Hu , Fan Li

In observational studies, balancing covariates in different treatment groups is essential to estimate treatment effects. One of the most commonly used methods for such purposes is weighting. The performance of this class of methods usually…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-07-07 Ruoqi Yu , Shulei Wang

Positivity violations, which occur when some subgroups either always or never receive a treatment of interest, pose significant challenges for causal effect estimation with observational data. Recent balancing weight methods have proved to…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-17 Martha Barnard , Jared D. Huling , Julian Wolfson