Population intervention models in causal inference

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Hubbard, Alan E.; Van der Laan, Mark J.
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Berkeley
• 刊物名称: BIOMETRIKA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0006-3444
• DOI: 10.1093/biomet/asm097
• 发表日期: 2008
• 页码: 3547
• 关键词: randomized-trials; noncompliance

摘要

We propose a new causal parameter, which is a natural extension of existing approaches to causal inference such as marginal structural models. Modelling approaches are proposed for the difference between a treatment-specific counterfactual population distribution and the actual population distribution of an outcome in the target population of interest. Relevant parameters describe the effect of a hypothetical intervention on such a population and therefore we refer to these models as population intervention models. We focus on intervention models estimating the effect of an intervention in terms of a difference and ratio of means, called risk difference and relative risk if the outcome is binary. We provide a class of inverse-probability-of-treatment-weighted and doubly-robust estimators of the causal parameters in these models. The finite-sample performance of these new estimators is explored in a simulation study.