Related papers: Addressing Positivity Violations in Extending Infe…
Randomized clinical trials are considered the gold standard for informing treatment guidelines, but results may not generalize to real-world populations. Generalizability is hindered by distributional differences in baseline covariates and…
When individuals participating in a randomized trial differ with respect to the distribution of effect modifiers compared compared with the target population where the trial results will be used, treatment effect estimates from the trial…
Studies intended to estimate the effect of a treatment, like randomized trials, may not be sampled from the desired target population. To correct for this discrepancy, estimates can be transported to the target population. Methods for…
In observational studies, causal inference relies on several key identifying assumptions. One identifiability condition is the positivity assumption, which requires the probability of treatment be bounded away from 0 and 1. That is, for…
When assessing causal effects, determining the target population to which the results are intended to generalize is a critical decision. Randomized and observational studies each have strengths and limitations for estimating causal effects…
Background: Randomized controlled trials are often used to inform policy and practice for broad populations. The average treatment effect (ATE) for a target population, however, may be different from the ATE observed in a trial if there are…
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…
Positivity violations, which occur when some subgroups either always or never receive a treatment of interest, pose significant challenges for causal effect estimation with observational data. Recent balancing weight methods have proved to…
Generalizing treatment effects from a randomized trial to a target population requires the assumption that potential outcome distributions are invariant across populations after conditioning on observed covariates. This assumption fails…
Violations of the positivity assumption (also called the common support condition) challenge health policy research, and can result in significant bias, large variance, and invalid inference. We define positivity in the single- and…
The positivity assumption is central in the identification of a causal effect, and especially the stochastic variant is an issue many applied researchers face, yet is rarely discussed, especially in conjunction with continuous treatments or…
Attrition is a common and potentially important threat to internal validity in treatment effect studies. We extend the changes-in-changes approach to identify the average treatment effect for respondents and the entire study population in…
When estimating an effect of an action with a randomized or observational study, that study is often not a random sample of the desired target population. Instead, estimates from that study can be transported to the target population.…
Causal inference in a program evaluation setting faces the problem of external validity when the treatment effect in the target population is different from the treatment effect identified from the population of which the sample is…
Recent methods to improve generalizations from nonrandom samples typically invoke assumptions such as the strong ignorability of sample selection that are often controversial in practice to derive point estimates. Rather than focus on the…
Generalizability and transportability methods have been proposed to address the external validity bias of randomized clinical trials that results from differences in the distribution of treatment effect modifiers between trial and target…
Background: Sequential positivity is often a necessary assumption for drawing causal inferences, such as through marginal structural modeling. Unfortunately, verification of this assumption can be challenging because it usually relies on…
Investigators are increasingly using novel methods for extending (generalizing or transporting) causal inferences from a trial to a target population. In many generalizability and transportability analyses, the trial and the observational…
Randomized clinical trials are the gold standard when estimating the average treatment effect. However, they are usually not a random sample from the real-world population because of the inclusion/exclusion rules. Meanwhile, observational…
The dearth of prescribing guidelines for physicians is one key driver of the current opioid epidemic in the United States. In this work, we analyze medical and pharmaceutical claims data to draw insights on characteristics of patients who…