Balancing Covariates via Propensity Score Weighting

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Li, Fan; Morgan, Kari Lock; Zaslavsky, Alan M.
• 署名单位: Duke University; Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education (PCSHE); Pennsylvania State University; Pennsylvania State University - University Park; Harvard University; Harvard Medical School
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0162-1459
• DOI: 10.1080/01621459.2016.1260466
• 发表日期: 2018
• 页码: 390-400
• 关键词: Causal Inference; models; overlap; care

摘要

Covariate balance is crucial for unconfounded descriptive or causal comparisons. However, lack of balance is common in observational studies. This article considers weighting strategies for balancing covariates. We define a general class of weightsthe balancing weightsthat balance the weighted distributions of the covariates between treatment groups. These weights incorporate the propensity score to weight each group to an analyst-selected target population. This class unifies existing weighting methods, including commonly used weights such as inverse-probability weights as special cases. General large-sample results on nonparametric estimation based on these weights are derived. We further propose a new weighting scheme, the overlap weights, in which each unit's weight is proportional to the probability of that unit being assigned to the opposite group. The overlap weights are bounded, and minimize the asymptotic variance of the weighted average treatment effect among the class of balancing weights. The overlap weights also possess a desirable small-sample exact balance property, based on which we propose a new method that achieves exact balance for means of any selected set of covariates. Two applications illustrate these methods and compare them with other approaches.