Related papers: Target trial emulation without matching: a more ef…
The current COVID-19 pandemic poses numerous challenges for ongoing clinical trials and provides a stress-testing environment for the existing principles and practice of estimands in clinical trials. The pandemic may increase the rate of…
We consider the problem of deciding how best to target and prioritize existing vaccines that may offer protection against new variants of an infectious disease. Sequential experiments are a promising approach; however, challenges due to…
We review standard mediation assumptions as they apply to identifying antibody effects in a randomized vaccine trial and propose new study designs to allow identification of an estimand that was previously unidentifiable. For these…
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the urgent need for effective vaccine policies, but traditional clinical trials often lack sufficient data to capture the diverse population characteristics necessary for comprehensive public health…
We propose a monitoring strategy for efficient and robust estimation of disease prevalence and case numbers within closed and enumerated populations such as schools, workplaces, or retirement communities. The proposed design relies largely…
Plasmode simulation has become an important tool for evaluating the operating characteristics of different statistical methods in complex settings, such as pharmacoepidemiological studies of treatment effectiveness using electronic health…
We develop new matching estimators for estimating causal quantile exposure-response functions and quantile exposure effects with continuous treatments. We provide identification results for the parameters of interest and establish the…
Confounding is a significant obstacle to unbiased estimation of causal effects from observational data. For settings with high-dimensional covariates -- such as text data, genomics, or the behavioral social sciences -- researchers have…
Vaccination has played an important role in preventing the spread of infectious diseases. However, the limited availability of vaccines and personnel at the roll-out of a new vaccine and the costs of vaccination campaigns often limit how…
This study aims to statistically assess the effectiveness of vaccination against SARS-CoV-2. It is indispensable to investigate the relationship between Covid-19 deadliness and vaccination in order to study the impact of vaccine in…
Qatar has undergone distinct waves of COVID-19 infections, compounded by the emergence of variants, posing additional complexities. This research uniquely delves into the varied efficacy of existing vaccines and the pivotal role of…
Results from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) help determine vaccination strategies and related public health policies. However, defining and identifying estimands that can guide policies in infectious disease settings is difficult, even…
The estimation of causal effects is a fundamental goal in the field of causal inference. However, it is challenging for various reasons. One reason is that the exposure (or treatment) is naturally continuous in many real-world scenarios.…
Since the recent introduction of several viable vaccines for SARS-CoV-2, vaccination uptake has become the key factor that will determine our success in containing the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that game theory and social network models…
This paper describes an agent-based model of epidemics dynamics. This model is willingly simplified, as its goal is not to predict the evolution of the epidemics, but to explain the underlying mechanisms in an interactive way. This model…
Suppose one has data from one or more completed vaccine efficacy trials and wishes to estimate the efficacy in a new setting. Often logistical or ethical considerations make running another efficacy trial impossible. Fortunately, if there…
Causal mediation analysis examines causal pathways linking exposures to disease. The estimation of interventional effects, which are mediation estimands that overcome certain identifiability problems of natural effects, has been advanced…
Matching estimators for average treatment effects are widely used in the binary treatment setting, in which missing potential outcomes are imputed as the average of observed outcomes of all matches for each unit. With more than two…
COVID-19 vaccines have proven to be effective against SARS-CoV-2 infection. However, the dynamics of vaccine-induced immunological memory development and neutralizing antibodies generation are not fully understood, limiting vaccine…
With the emergence and spread of infectious diseases with pandemic potential, such as COVID- 19, the urgency for vaccine development have led to unprecedented compressed and accelerated schedules that shortened the standard development…