Graphical criteria for the identification of marginal causal effects in continuous-time survival and event-history analyses

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Roysland, Kjetil; Ryalen, Pal C.; Nygard, Mari; Didelez, Vanessa
• 署名单位: University of Oslo; Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology Domain; Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne; University of Oslo; Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH); University of Bremen; Leibniz Association; Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research & Epidemiology (BIPS)
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL STATISTICAL SOCIETY SERIES B-STATISTICAL METHODOLOGY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1369-7412
• DOI: 10.1093/jrsssb/qkae056
• 发表日期: 2024
• 页码: 74-97
• 关键词: dynamic treatment regimes; structural models; inference; INDEPENDENCE; diagrams

摘要

We consider continuous-time survival and event-history settings, where our aim is to graphically represent causal structures allowing us to characterize when a causal parameter is identified from observational data. This causal parameter is formalized as the effect on an outcome event of a (possibly hypothetical) intervention on the intensity of a treatment process. To establish identifiability, we propose novel graphical rules indicating whether the observed information is sufficient to obtain the desired causal effect by suitable reweighting. This requires a different type of graph than in discrete time. We formally define causal semantics for the corresponding dynamic graphs that represent local independence models for multivariate counting processes. Importantly, our work highlights that causal inference from censored data relies on subtle structural assumptions on the censoring process beyond independent censoring; these can be verified graphically. Put together, our results are the first to establish graphical rules for nonparametric causal identifiability in event processes in this generality for the continuous-time case, not relying on particular parametric survival models. We conclude with a data example on Human papillomavirus (HPV) testing for cervical cancer screening, where the assumptions are illustrated graphically and the desired effect is estimated by reweighted cumulative incidence curves.