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Covariate adjustment is widely recommended to improve statistical efficiency in randomized clinical trials (RCTs), yet empirical evidence comparing available strategies remains limited. This lack of real-world evaluation leaves unresolved…

Applications · Statistics 2026-02-03 Yulin Shao , Liangbo Lyu , Menggang Yu , Bingkai Wang

While randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are the gold standard for estimating causal treatment effects, their limited sample sizes and restrictive criteria make it difficult to extrapolate to a broader population. Observational data, while…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-09 Stephanie Riley , Ricardo Silva , Matthew Sperrin

Although complete randomization ensures covariate balance on average, the chance for observing significant differences between treatment and control covariate distributions increases with many covariates. Rerandomization discards…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-08-15 Xinran Li , Peng Ding , Donald B. Rubin

Complementary features of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and observational studies (OSs) can be used jointly to estimate the average treatment effect of a target population. We propose a calibration weighting estimator that enforces…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-02-16 Dasom Lee , Shu Yang , Lin Dong , Xiaofei Wang , Donglin Zeng , Jianwen Cai

A randomized controlled trial (RCT) is widely regarded as the gold standard for assessing the causal effect of a treatment or intervention, assuming perfect implementation. In practice, however, randomization can be compromised for various…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-21 Yin Tang , Yanyuan Ma , Jiwei Zhao

Cluster-randomized trials (CRTs) are widely used to evaluate group-level interventions and increasingly collect multiple outcomes capturing complementary dimensions of benefit and risk. Investigators often seek a single global summary of…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-22 Xinyuan Chen , Fan Li

Randomized clinical trials (RCTs) are widely considered the gold standard for evaluating the effectiveness of new treatments or interventions in drug development. Still, they may not be feasible in certain cases, such as with rare diseases…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-05 Di Ran , Fanni Zhang , Sima Shahsavari , Kristine Broglio , Alasdair Henderson , Binbing Yu

The gold standard for identifying causal relationships is a randomized controlled experiment. In many applications in the social sciences and medicine, the researcher does not control the assignment mechanism and instead may rely upon…

Applications · Statistics 2016-11-22 Johann Gagnon-Bartsch , Yotam Shem-Tov

It is common to conduct causal inference in matched observational studies by proceeding as though treatment assignments within matched sets are assigned uniformly at random and using this distribution as the basis for inference. This…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-11-14 Samuel D. Pimentel , Yaxuan Huang

Most of the widely used estimators of the average treatment effect (ATE) in causal inference rely on the assumptions of unconfoundedness and overlap. Unconfoundedness requires that the observed covariates account for all correlations…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-07-01 Yang Cai , Alkis Kalavasis , Katerina Mamali , Anay Mehrotra , Manolis Zampetakis

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

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) provide strong internal validity compared with observational studies. However, selection bias threatens the external validity of randomized trials. Thus, RCT results may not apply to either broad public…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-04-26 Ziyue Chen , Eloise Kaizar

Paired cluster-randomized experiments (pCRTs) are common across many disciplines because there is often natural clustering of individuals, and paired randomization can help balance baseline covariates to improve experimental precision.…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-03 Charlotte Z. Mann , Adam C. Sales , Johann A. Gagnon-Bartsch

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are often considered the gold standard for estimating causal effect, but they may lack external validity when the population eligible to the RCT is substantially different from the target population.…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-11 Bénédicte Colnet , Julie Josse , Erwan Scornet , Gaël Varoquaux

Amidst rising appreciation for privacy and data usage rights, researchers have increasingly acknowledged the principle of data minimization, which holds that the accessibility, collection, and retention of subjects' data should be kept to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-10-22 Winston Chou

A common assumption in causal inference is that random treatment assignment ensures that potential outcomes are independent of treatment, or in one word, unconfoundedness. This paper highlights that randomization and unconfoundedness are…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-07-30 Fredrik Sävje

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are the gold standard for comparing the effectiveness of a new treatment to the current one (the control). Most RCTs allocate the patients to the treatment group and the control group by uniform…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-22 Onur Atan , William R. Zame , Mihaela van der Schaar

Understanding the effects of interventions is central to scientific progress, with randomized controlled trials (RCTs) regarded as the gold standard for causal inference in many applied fields. However, RCTs are costly, time-consuming, and…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-27 Drago Plecko , Patrik Okanovic , Torsten Hoefler , Elias Bareinboim

Despite their cost, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are widely regarded as gold-standard evidence in disciplines ranging from social science to medicine. In recent decades, researchers have increasingly sought to reduce the resource…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-24 Guilherme Duarte

The randomized controlled trial (RCT) is the gold standard for estimating the average treatment effect (ATE) of a medical intervention but requires 100s-1000s of subjects, making it expensive and difficult to implement. While a cross-over…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-05-10 Sayeri Lala , Niraj K. Jha