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Estimating externally valid causal effects is a foundational problem in the social and biomedical sciences. Generalizing or transporting causal estimates from an experimental sample to a target population of interest relies on an overlap…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-03-29 Melody Huang

When engagement with a randomized trial is driven by factors that affect the outcome or when trial engagement directly affects the outcome independent of treatment, the average treatment effect among trial participants is unlikely to…

When considering the effect a treatment will cause in a population of interest, we often look to evidence from randomized controlled trials. In settings where multiple trials on a treatment are available, we may wish to synthesize the…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-09-08 Nicole Schnitzler , Eloise Kaizar

We take steps towards causally interpretable meta-analysis by describing methods for transporting causal inferences from a collection of randomized trials to a new target population, one-trial-at-a-time and pooling all trials. We discuss…

With medical tests becoming increasingly available, concerns about over-testing and over-treatment dramatically increase. Hence, it is important to understand the influence of testing on treatment selection in general practice. Most…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-08-11 Yun Li , Irina Bondarenko , Michael R. Elliott , Timothy P. Hofer , Jeremy M. G. Taylor

When treatment effect modifiers influence the decision to participate in a randomized trial, the average treatment effect in the population represented by the randomized individuals will differ from the effect in other populations. In this…

Methods for extending -- generalizing or transporting -- inferences from a randomized trial to a target population involve conditioning on a large set of covariates that is sufficient for rendering the randomized and non-randomized groups…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-10-04 Sarah E Robertson , Jon A Steingrimsson , Issa J Dahabreh

Unobserved effect modifiers can induce bias when generalizing causal effect estimates to target populations. In this work, we extend a sensitivity analysis framework assessing the robustness of study results to unobserved effect…

Violations of the positivity assumption can render conventional causal estimands unidentifiable, including the average treatment effect (ATE), the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT), and the average treatment effect on the…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-14 Yi Liu , Yuan Wang , Ying Gao , Tonia Poteat , Roland A. Matsouaka

From scientific experiments to online A/B testing, the previously observed data often affects how future experiments are performed, which in turn affects which data will be collected. Such adaptivity introduces complex correlations between…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-01-03 Xinkun Nie , Xiaoying Tian , Jonathan Taylor , James Zou

In this paper, we develop a method to assess the sensitivity of local average treatment effect estimates to potential violations of the monotonicity assumption of Imbens and Angrist (1994). We parameterize the degree to which monotonicity…

Econometrics · Economics 2021-06-14 Claudia Noack

The assumption of positivity in causal inference (also known as common support and co-variate overlap) is necessary to obtain valid causal estimates. Therefore, confirming it holds in a given dataset is an important first step of any causal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-07-19 Ehud Karavani , Peter Bak , Yishai Shimoni

Randomized control trials (RCTs) are the gold standard for estimating causal effects, but often use samples that are non-representative of the actual population of interest. We propose a reweighting method for estimating population average…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-02-09 Kellie Ottoboni , Jason Poulos

Learning individualized treatment rules (ITRs) is an important topic in precision medicine. Current literature mainly focuses on deriving ITRs from a single source population. We consider the observational data setting when the source…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-04 Rui Chen , Jared D. Huling , Guanhua Chen , Menggang Yu

Extending (generalizing or transporting) causal inferences from a randomized trial to a target population requires ``generalizability'' or ``transportability'' assumptions, which state that randomized and non-randomized individuals are…

Clinical study populations often differ meaningfully from the broader populations to which results are intended to generalize. Weighting methods such as inverse probability of sampling weights (IPSW) reweight study participants to resemble…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-02 William Stewart , Carly L. Brantner , Elizabeth A. Stuart , Laine Thomas

Epidemiologic screening programs often make use of tests with small, but non-zero probabilities of misdiagnosis. In this article, we assume the target population is finite with a fixed number of true cases, and that we apply an imperfect…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-04-22 Lin Ge , Yuzi Zhang , Lance A. Waller , Robert H. Lyles

Consider sensitivity analysis for estimating average treatment effects under unmeasured confounding, assumed to satisfy a marginal sensitivity model. At the population level, we provide new representations for the sharp population bounds…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-09-26 Zhiqiang Tan

Limited overlap between treated and control groups is a key challenge in observational analysis. Standard approaches like trimming importance weights can reduce variance but introduce a fundamental bias. We propose a sensitivity framework…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-21 Yuanzhe Ma , Yian Huang , Hongseok Namkoong

This paper considers conducting inference about the effect of a treatment (or exposure) on an outcome of interest. In the ideal setting where treatment is assigned randomly, under certain assumptions the treatment effect is identifiable…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-03-06 Amy Richardson , Michael G. Hudgens , Peter B. Gilbert , Jason P. Fine