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We describe how the target trial framework can be used to plan and report analyses that attempt to answer causal questions by combining information from multiple, diverse sources. Such analyses may involve comparisons of treatments…
We discuss the identifiability of causal estimands for generalizability and transportability analyses, both under perfect and imperfect adherence to treatment assignment. We consider a setting where the trial data contain information on…
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…
We discovered secular trend bias in a drug effectiveness study for a recently approved drug. We compared treatment outcomes between patients who received the newly approved drug and patients exposed to the standard treatment. All patients…
In the presence of treatment effect heterogeneity, the average treatment effect (ATE) in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) may differ from the average effect of the same treatment if applied to a target population of interest. If all…
Understanding treatment effect heterogeneity has become increasingly important in many fields. In this paper we study distributions and quantiles of individual treatment effects to provide a more comprehensive and robust understanding of…
Complementary features of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and observational studies (OSs) can be used jointly to estimate the average treatment effect of a target population. We propose a calibration weighting estimator that enforces…
In most medical research, the average treatment effect is used to evaluate a treatment's performance. However, precision medicine requires knowledge of individual treatment effects: What is the difference between a unit's measurement under…
Researchers are frequently interested in understanding the causal effect of treatment interventions. However, in some cases, the treatment of interest--readily available in a randomized controlled trial (RCT)--is either not directly…
Evaluating treatment effect heterogeneity widely informs treatment decision making. At the moment, much emphasis is placed on the estimation of the conditional average treatment effect via flexible machine learning algorithms. While these…
When estimating causal effects, it is important to assess external validity, i.e., determine how useful a given study is to inform a practical question for a specific target population. One challenge is that the covariate distribution in…
Randomized trials are widely considered as the gold standard for evaluating the effects of decision policies. Trial data is, however, drawn from a population which may differ from the intended target population and this raises a problem of…
This paper investigates the robustness of futility analyses in clinical trials when interim analysis population deviates from the target population. We demonstrate how population shifts can distort early stopping decisions and propose…
Many applications of causal inference require using treatment effects estimated on a study population to make decisions in a separate target population. We consider the challenging setting where there are covariates that are observed in the…
Standard approaches in generalizability often focus on generalizing the intent-to-treat (ITT). However, in practice, a more policy-relevant quantity is the generalized impact of an intervention across compliers. While instrumental variable…
Suppose we are interested in the effect of a treatment in a clinical trial. The efficiency of inference may be limited due to small sample size. However, external control data are often available from historical studies. Motivated by an…
Leveraging external controls -- relevant individual patient data under control from external trials or real-world data -- has the potential to reduce the cost of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) while increasing the proportion of trial…
We consider real-time timely tracking of infection status (e.g., covid-19) of individuals in a population. In this work, a health care provider wants to detect infected people as well as people who recovered from the disease as quickly as…
The problem of missingness in observational data is ubiquitous. When the confounders are missing at random, multiple imputation is commonly used; however, the method requires congeniality conditions for valid inferences, which may not be…
Cross-sectional HIV incidence estimation leverages recency test results to determine the HIV incidence of a population of interest, where recency test uses biomarker profiles to infer whether an HIV-positive individual was "recently"…