Related papers: Effect Aliasing in Observational Studies

Reliable treatment effect estimation from observational data depends on the availability of all confounding information. While much work has targeted treatment effect estimation from observational data, there is relatively little work in…

Comparative binary outcome data are of fundamental interest in statistics and are often pooled in meta-analyses. Here we examine the simplest case where for each study there are two patient groups and a binary event of interest, giving rise…

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…

In randomized experiments, interactions between units might generate a treatment diffusion process. This is common when the treatment of interest is an actual object or product that can be shared among peers (e.g., flyers, booklets,…

Estimating causal effects under exogeneity hinges on two key assumptions: unconfoundedness and overlap. Researchers often argue that unconfoundedness is more plausible when more covariates are included in the analysis. Less discussed is the…

Matching is one of the most widely used causal inference frameworks in observational studies. However, all the existing matching-based causal inference methods are designed for either a single treatment with general treatment types (e.g.,…

A data science task can be deemed as making sense of the data or testing a hypothesis about it. The conclusions inferred from data can greatly guide us to make informative decisions. Big data has enabled us to carry out countless prediction…

Estimating causal effects from observational data is not always possible due to confounding. Identifying a set of appropriate covariates (adjustment set) and adjusting for their influence can remove confounding bias; however, such a set is…

Randomized experiments are the gold standard for causal inference, and justify simple comparisons across treatment groups. Regression adjustment provides a convenient way to incorporate covariate information for additional efficiency. This…

Time plays a fundamental role in causal analyses, where the goal is to quantify the effect of a specific treatment on future outcomes. In a randomized experiment, times of treatment, and when outcomes are observed, are typically well…

This paper studies inference in cluster randomized trials where treatment status is determined according to a "matched pairs" design. Here, by a cluster randomized experiment, we mean one in which treatment is assigned at the level of the…

Experimental designs are fundamental for estimating causal effects. In some fields, within-subjects designs, which expose participants to both control and treatment at different time periods, are used to address practical and logistical…

Instrumental variable methods are widely used in medical and social science research to draw causal conclusions when the treatment and outcome are confounded by unmeasured confounding variables. One important feature of such studies is that…

Nonlinear longitudinal proportional effect models have been proposed to improve power and provide direct estimates of the proportional treatment effect in randomized clinical trials. These models assume a fixed proportional treatment effect…

Randomized experiments are often performed to study the causal effects of interest. Blocking is a technique to precisely estimate the causal effects when the experimental material is not homogeneous. It involves stratifying the available…

Observational data is often readily available in large quantities, but can lead to biased causal effect estimates due to the presence of unobserved confounding. Recent works attempt to remove this bias by supplementing observational data…

Estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects is an active area of research. Most of the existing methods, however, focus on estimating the conditional average treatment effects of a single, binary treatment given a set of pre-treatment…

Triple difference designs have become increasingly popular in empirical economics. The advantage of a triple difference design is that, within a treatment group, it allows for another subgroup of the population -- potentially less impacted…

The estimation of causal treatment effects from observational data is a fundamental problem in causal inference. To avoid bias, the effect estimator must control for all confounders. Hence practitioners often collect data for as many…

Interference arises when an individual's potential outcome depends on the individual treatment level, but also on the treatment level of others. A common assumption in the causal inference literature in the presence of interference is…