Related papers: Constructing g-computation estimators: two case st…

In longitudinal observational studies with time-to-event outcomes, a common objective in causal analysis is to estimate the causal survival curve under hypothetical intervention scenarios. The g-formula is a useful tool for this analysis.…

The purpose of many health studies is to estimate the effect of an exposure on an outcome. It is not always ethical to assign an exposure to individuals in randomised controlled trials, instead observational data and appropriate study…

Performing causal inference in observational studies requires we assume confounding variables are correctly adjusted for. G-computation methods are often used in these scenarios, with several recent proposals using Bayesian versions of…

Epidemiologists increasingly use causal inference methods that rely on machine learning, as these approaches can relax unnecessary model specification assumptions. While deriving and studying asymptotic properties of such estimators is a…

Difference in proportions is frequently used to measure treatment effect for binary outcomes in randomized clinical trials. The estimation of difference in proportions can be assisted by adjusting for prognostic baseline covariates to…

We propose a novel definition of selection bias in analytic epidemiology using potential outcomes. This definition captures selection bias under both the structural approach (where conditioning on selection into the study opens a noncausal…

Selection bias arises when the probability that an observation enters a dataset depends on variables related to the quantities of interest, leading to systematic distortions in estimation and uncertainty quantification. For example, in…

Cluster-randomized experiments are increasingly used to evaluate interventions in routine practice conditions, and researchers often adopt model-based methods with covariate adjustment in the statistical analyses. However, the validity of…

Compartmental epidemic models have been widely used for predicting the course of epidemics, from estimating the basic reproduction number to guiding intervention policies. Studies commonly acknowledge these models' assumptions but less…

Adjusting for covariates is a well established method to estimate the total causal effect of an exposure variable on an outcome of interest. Depending on the causal structure of the mechanism under study there may be different adjustment…

Given a large dataset and an estimation task, it is common to pre-process the data by reducing them to a set of sufficient statistics. This step is often regarded as straightforward and advantageous (in that it simplifies statistical…

One way to investigate the precision of estimates likely to result from planned experiments and planned epidemiological studies is to simulate a large number of possible outcomes and analyse the sets of possible results. This appears to be…

Genetic Gaussian network of multiple phenotypes constructed through the genetic correlation matrix is informative for understanding their biological dependencies. However, its interpretation may be challenging because the estimated genetic…

The g-formula can be used to estimate causal effects of sustained treatment strategies using observational data under the identifying assumptions of consistency, positivity, and exchangeability. The non-iterative conditional expectation…

We address the common yet often-overlooked selection bias in interventional studies, where subjects are selectively enrolled into experiments. For instance, participants in a drug trial are usually patients of the relevant disease; A/B…

The recently published ICH E9 addendum on estimands in clinical trials provides a framework for precisely defining the treatment effect that is to be estimated, but says little about estimation methods. Here we report analyses of a clinical…

In adaptive clinical trials, the conventional end-of-trial point estimate of a treatment effect is prone to bias, that is, a systematic tendency to deviate from its true value. As stated in recent FDA guidance on adaptive designs, it is…

Evaluation of treatment effects and more general estimands is typically achieved via parametric modelling, which is unsatisfactory since model misspecification is likely. Data-adaptive model building (e.g. statistical/machine learning) is…

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in using machine learning techniques for the estimation of treatment effects. Most of the best-performing methods rely on representation learning strategies that encourage shared behavior…

Over the last decades, many prognostic models based on artificial intelligence techniques have been used to provide detailed predictions in healthcare. Unfortunately, the real-world observational data used to train and validate these models…