Related papers: The Balancing Act in Causal Inference
The propensity score analysis is one of the most widely used methods for studying the causal treatment effect in observational studies. This paper studies treatment effect estimation with the method of matching weights. This method…
In epidemiology and social sciences, propensity score methods are popular for estimating treatment effects using observational data, and multiple imputation is popular for handling covariate missingness. However, how to appropriately use…
Weighting methods are used in observational studies to adjust for covariate imbalances between treatment and control groups. Entropy balancing (EB) is an alternative to inverse probability weighting with an estimated propensity score. The…
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.…
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…
Propensity score weighting is a tool for causal inference to adjust for measured confounders. Survey data are often collected under complex sampling designs such as multistage cluster sampling, which presents challenges for propensity score…
This paper investigates the theoretical foundation and develops analytical formulas for sample size and power calculations for causal inference with observational data. By analyzing the variance of an inverse probability weighting estimator…
In observational studies, propensity scores are commonly estimated by maxi- mum likelihood but may fail to balance high-dimensional pre-treatment covariates even after specification search. We introduce a general framework that unifies and…
In this paper, we study causal inference when the treatment variable is an aggregation of multiple sub-treatment variables. Researchers often report marginal causal effects for the aggregated treatment, implicitly assuming that the target…
Causal inference starts with a simple idea: compare groups that differ by treatment, not much else. Traditionally, similar groups are constructed using only observed covariates; however, it remains a long-standing challenge to incorporate…
In this paper, we propose a propensity score adapted variable selection procedure to select covariates for inclusion in propensity score models, in order to eliminate confounding bias and improve statistical efficiency in observational…
Propensity score weighting is a common method for estimating treatment effects with survey data. The method is applied to minimize confounding using measured covariates that are often different between individuals in treatment and control.…
When using the propensity score method to estimate the treatment effects, it is important to select the covariates to be included in the propensity score model. The inclusion of covariates unrelated to the outcome in the propensity score…
In the absence of unobserved confounders, matching and weighting methods are widely used to estimate causal quantities including the Average Treatment Effect on the Treated (ATT). Unfortunately, these methods do not necessarily achieve…
We propose a new perspective for the evaluation of matching procedures by considering the complexity of the function class they belong to. Under this perspective we provide theoretical guarantees on post-matching covariate balance through a…
Inverse weighting with an estimated propensity score is widely used by estimation methods in causal inference to adjust for confounding bias. However, directly inverting propensity score estimates can lead to instability, bias, and…
Observational cohort studies with oversampled exposed subjects are typically implemented to understand the causal effect of a rare exposure. Because the distribution of exposed subjects in the sample differs from the source population,…
Although propensity scores have been central to the estimation of causal effects for over 30 years, only recently has the statistical literature begun to consider in detail methods for Bayesian estimation of propensity scores and causal…
Inverse propensity weighting (IPW) is a popular method for estimating treatment effects from observational data. However, its correctness relies on the untestable (and frequently implausible) assumption that all confounders have been…
Estimating the average treatment causal effect in clustered data often involves dealing with unmeasured cluster-specific confounding variables. Such variables may be correlated with the measured unit covariates and outcome. When the…