Related papers: Conflating marginal and conditional treatment effe…
Causal evidence is needed to act and it is often enough for the evidence to point towards a direction of the effect of an action. For example, policymakers might be interested in estimating the effect of slightly increasing taxes on private…
This commentary regards a recent simulation study conducted by Aouni, Gaudel-Dedieu and Sebastien, evaluating the performance of different versions of matching-adjusted indirect comparison (MAIC) in an anchored scenario with a common…
The propensity score is a common tool for estimating the causal effect of a binary treatment in observational data. In this setting, matching, subclassification, imputation, or inverse probability weighting on the propensity score can…
Identification of standard mediated effects such as the natural indirect effect relies on heavy causal assumptions. By circumventing such assumptions, so-called randomized interventional indirect effects have gained popularity in the…
Causal mediation analysis is used to evaluate direct and indirect causal effects of a treatment on an outcome of interest through an intermediate variable or a mediator.It is difficult to identify the direct and indirect causal effects…
Data from both a randomized trial and an observational study are sometimes simultaneously available for evaluating the effect of an intervention. The randomized data typically allows for reliable estimation of average treatment effects but…
When treatment effect modifiers influence the decision to participate in a randomized trial, the average treatment effect in the population represented by the randomized individuals will differ from the effect in other populations. In this…
There are a number of measures of direct and indirect effects in the literature. They are suitable in some cases and unsuitable in others. We describe a case where the existing measures are unsuitable and propose new suitable ones. We also…
Instrumental variables are widely used to deal with unmeasured confounding in observational studies and imperfect randomized controlled trials. In these studies, researchers often target the so-called local average treatment effect as it is…
Randomized clinical trials typically aim to estimate a marginal treatment effect. While covariate adjustment can improve precision, it may change the estimand in nonlinear models due to noncollapsibility, leading to conditional rather than…
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…
Researchers are often interested in analyzing conditional treatment effects. One variant of this is "causal moderation," which implies that intervention upon a third (moderator) variable would alter the treatment effect. This study…
Treatment effect estimates are often available from randomized controlled trials as a single average treatment effect for a certain patient population. Estimates of the conditional average treatment effect (CATE) are more useful for…
Heterogeneous treatment effects are of major interest in economics. For example, a poverty reduction measure would be best evaluated by its effects on those who would be poor in the absence of the treatment, or by the share among the poor…
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…
Treatment effect estimation is a fundamental problem in causal inference. We focus on designing efficient randomized controlled trials, to accurately estimate the effect of some treatment on a population of $n$ individuals. In particular,…
Much evidence in comparative effectiveness research is based on observational studies. Researchers who conduct observational studies typically assume that there are no unobservable differences between the treated and control groups.…
In the absence of randomized controlled and natural experiments, it is necessary to balance the distributions of (observable) covariates of the treated and control groups in order to obtain an unbiased estimate of a causal effect of…
Researchers are often interested in treatment effects on outcomes that are only defined conditional on a post-treatment event status. For example, in a study of the effect of different cancer treatments on quality of life at end of…
Beyond conditional average treatment effects, treatments may impact the entire outcome distribution in covariate-dependent ways, for example, by altering the variance or tail risks for specific subpopulations. We propose a novel estimand to…