Related papers: Assessing Vaccine Effectiveness in Observational S…
Study populations are typically sampled from limited points in space and time, and marginalized groups are underrepresented. To assess the external validity of randomized and observational studies, we propose and evaluate the worst-case…
Observational studies are valuable for estimating the effects of various medical interventions, but are notoriously difficult to evaluate because the methods used in observational studies require many untestable assumptions. This lack of…
Declines in vaccination coverage for vaccine-preventable diseases, such as measles and chickenpox, have enabled their surprising comebacks and pose significant public health challenges in the wake of growing vaccine hesitancy. Vaccine…
While sample sizes in randomized clinical trials are large enough to estimate the average treatment effect well, they are often insufficient for estimation of treatment-covariate interactions critical to studying data-driven precision…
Developing tools for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) and individualized treatment effects has been an area of active research in recent years. While these tools have proven to be useful in many contexts, a concern when…
We propose a framework for the description of the effects of vaccinations on the spreading of an epidemic disease. Different vaccines can be dosed, each providing different immunization times and immunization levels. Differences due to…
A platform trial with a master protocol provides an infrastructure to ethically and efficiently evaluate multiple treatment options in multiple diseases. Given that certain study drugs can enter or exit a platform trial, the randomization…
Experimenters often collect baseline data to study heterogeneity. I propose the first valid confidence intervals for the VCATE, the treatment effect variance explained by observables. Conventional approaches yield incorrect coverage when…
Influenza is a contagious respiratory illness that causes significant human morbidity and mortality, affecting 5-15% of the population in a typical epidemic season. Human influenza epidemics are caused by types A and B, with roughly 25% of…
Vaccines not only directly protect vaccinated individuals but also contribute to protect the entire population via indirect herd-immunity benefits. However, researchers have long struggled to quantify these indirect effects at the…
Constructing confidence intervals (CIs) for the average treatment effect (ATE) from patient records is crucial to assess the effectiveness and safety of drugs. However, patient records typically come from different hospitals, thus raising…
Defining and identifying causal intervention effects for transmissible infectious disease outcomes is challenging because a treatment -- such as a vaccine -- given to one individual may affect the infection outcomes of others.…
Over 12 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered at the time of writing. However, public perceptions of vaccines have been complex. We analyzed COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets to understand the evolving perceptions of…
As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses, researchers are reporting findings of randomized trials comparing standard care with care augmented by experimental drugs. The trials have small sample sizes, so estimates of treatment effects are…
Measuring treatment effects in observational studies is challenging because of confounding bias. Confounding occurs when a variable affects both the treatment and the outcome. Traditional methods such as propensity score matching estimate…
While the HVTN 505 trial showed no overall efficacy of the tested vaccine to prevent HIV infection over placebo, previous studies, biological theories, and the finding that immune response markers strongly correlated with infection in…
If we can lower the number of people needed to vaccinate for a community to be immune against contagious diseases, we can save resources and life. A key to reach such a lower threshold of immunization is to find and vaccinate people who,…
Vaccination campaigns have saved thousands of lives, reaching the farthest places in the world. These campaigns have required substantial investments and accurate coordination between several actors within the vaccine supply chain. Despite…
Understanding whether and how treatment effects vary across subgroups is crucial to inform clinical practice and recommendations. Accordingly, the assessment of heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) based on pre-specified potential effect…
The advent and subsequent widespread availability of preventive vaccines has altered the course of public health over the past century. Despite this success, effective vaccines to prevent many high-burden diseases, including HIV, have been…