Efficient Propensity Score Regression Estimators of Multivalued Treatment Effects for the Treated

Efficient Propensity Score Regression Estimators of Multivalued Treatment Effects for the Treated PDF Author: Ying-Ying Lee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 35

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Book Description
Matching is a widely used program evaluation estimation method when treatment is assigned at random conditional on observable characteristics. When a multivalued treatment takes on more than two values, valid causal comparisons for a subpopulation who is treated a particular treatment level are based on two propensity scores - one for the treated level and one for the counterfactual level. The main contribution of this paper is propensity score regression estimators for a class of treatment effects for the treated that achieve the semiparametric efficiency bounds under the cases when the propensity scores are unknown and when they are known. We derive the large sample distribution that accounts for the estimation error of the propensity score as generated regressors. We contribute to the binary treatment literature by a new propensity score regression estimator for the average/quantile treatment effect for the treated: our efficient estimator matches on a normalized propensity score that is a combination of the true propensity score and its nonparametric estimate. There are two key findings: (I) The efficiency bound is reduced by knowledge of the propensity scores for the treated levels, but is not affected by knowledge of the propensity score for the counterfactual level. (II) Matching on the nonparametrically estimated propensity score recovers the information contained in matching on the pretreatment variables.

Efficient Propensity Score Regression Estimators of Multivalued Treatment Effects for the Treated

Efficient Propensity Score Regression Estimators of Multivalued Treatment Effects for the Treated PDF Author: Ying-Ying Lee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 35

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Book Description
Matching is a widely used program evaluation estimation method when treatment is assigned at random conditional on observable characteristics. When a multivalued treatment takes on more than two values, valid causal comparisons for a subpopulation who is treated a particular treatment level are based on two propensity scores - one for the treated level and one for the counterfactual level. The main contribution of this paper is propensity score regression estimators for a class of treatment effects for the treated that achieve the semiparametric efficiency bounds under the cases when the propensity scores are unknown and when they are known. We derive the large sample distribution that accounts for the estimation error of the propensity score as generated regressors. We contribute to the binary treatment literature by a new propensity score regression estimator for the average/quantile treatment effect for the treated: our efficient estimator matches on a normalized propensity score that is a combination of the true propensity score and its nonparametric estimate. There are two key findings: (I) The efficiency bound is reduced by knowledge of the propensity scores for the treated levels, but is not affected by knowledge of the propensity score for the counterfactual level. (II) Matching on the nonparametrically estimated propensity score recovers the information contained in matching on the pretreatment variables.

Effient Propensity Score Regression Estimators of Multi-valued Treatment Effects for the Treated

Effient Propensity Score Regression Estimators of Multi-valued Treatment Effects for the Treated PDF Author: Ying-Ying Lee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Efficient Estimation of Average Treatment Effects Using the Estimated Propensity Score

Efficient Estimation of Average Treatment Effects Using the Estimated Propensity Score PDF Author: Keisuke Hirano
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Estimation theory
Languages : en
Pages : 68

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Book Description
We are interested in estimating the average effect of a binary treatment on a scalar outcome. If assignment to the treatment is independent of the potential outcomes given pretreatment variables, biases associated with simple treatment-control average comparisons can be removed by adjusting for differences in the pre-treatment variables. Rosenbaum and Rubin (1983, 1984) show that adjusting solely for differences between treated and control units in a scalar function of the pre-treatment, the propensity score, also removes the entire bias associated with differences in pre-treatment variables. Thus it is possible to obtain unbiased estimates of the treatment effect without conditioning on a possibly high-dimensional vector of pre-treatment variables. Although adjusting for the propensity score removes all the bias, this can come at the expense of efficiency. We show that weighting with the inverse of a nonparametric estimate of the propensity score, rather than the true propensity score, leads to efficient estimates of the various average treatment effects. This result holds whether the pre-treatment variables have discrete or continuous distributions. We provide intuition for this result in a number of ways. First we show that with discrete covariates, exact adjustment for the estimated propensity score is identical to adjustment for the pre-treatment variables. Second, we show that weighting by the inverse of the estimated propensity score can be interpreted as an empirical likelihood estimator that efficiently incorporates the information about the propensity score. Finally, we make a connection to results to other results on efficient estimation through weighting in the context of variable probability sampling.

What is the Value of Knowing the Propensity Score for Estimating Average Treatment Effects?

What is the Value of Knowing the Propensity Score for Estimating Average Treatment Effects? PDF Author: Markus Frölich
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 28

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Efficient Treatment Effect Estimation with Dimension Reduction

Efficient Treatment Effect Estimation with Dimension Reduction PDF Author: Ying Zhang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 94

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Book Description
Estimation of average and quantile treatment effects is crucial in causal inference for evaluation of treatments or interventions in biomedical, economic, and social studies. Under the assumption of treatment and potential outcomes are independent conditional on all covariates, valid treatment effect estimators can be obtained using nonparametric inverse propensity weighting and/or regression, which are popular because no model on propensity or regression is imposed. To obtain valid and efficient treatment effect estimators, typically the set of all covariates can be replaced by lower dimensional sets containing linear combinations of covariates. We propose to construct a lower dimensional set separately for each treatment and show that the resulting asymptotic variance of treatment effect estimator reaches a lower bound that is smaller than those based on other sets. Since the lower dimensional sets have to be constructed, for example, using nonparametric sufficient dimension reduction, we derive theoretical results on when the efficiency of treatment effect estimation is affected by sufficient dimension reduction. We find that, except for some special cases, the efficiency of treatment effect estimation is affected even though the sufficient dimension reduction is consistent in the rate of the square root of the sample size. As causal setting is similar with that of missing data, we apply the same technics to handle missing covariate value problems in estimating equations. Our theory is complemented by some simulation results. We use the data from the University of Wisconsin Health Accountable Care Organization as an example for average/quantile treatment effects estimations, and the automobile data from University of California-Irvine as an example for estimating regression parameters in estimating equations with missing covariate value.

Semiparametric Estimation of Treatment Effects Parameters

Semiparametric Estimation of Treatment Effects Parameters PDF Author: Sergio Pinheiro Firpo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Bias and Variance of Treatment Effect Estimators Using Propensity-score Matching

Bias and Variance of Treatment Effect Estimators Using Propensity-score Matching PDF Author: Diqiong Xie
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Estimation theory
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Observational studies are an indispensable complement to randomized clinical trials (RCT) for comparison of treatment effectiveness. Often RCTs cannot be carried out due to the costs of the trial, ethical questions and rarity of the outcome. When noncompliance and missing data are prevalent, RCTs become more like observational studies. The main problem is to adjust for the selection bias in the observational study. One increasingly used method is propensity-score matching. Compared to traditional multi-covariate matching methods, matching on the propensity score alleviates the curse of dimensionality. It allows investigators to balance multiple covariate distributions between treatment groups by matching on a single score. This thesis focuses on the large sample properties of the matching estimators of the treatment effect. The first part of this thesis deals with problems of the analytic supports of the logit propensity score and various matching methods. The second part of this thesis focuses on the matching estimators of additive and multiplicative treatment effects. We derive the asymptotic order of the biases and asymptotic distributions of the matching estimators. We also derive the large sample variance estimators for the treatment effect estimators. The methods and theoretical results are applied and checked in a series of simulation studies. The third part of this thesis is devoted to a comparison between propensity-score matching and multiple linear regression using simulation.

Robust Interval Estimation of a Treatment Effect in Observational Studies Using Propensity Score Matching

Robust Interval Estimation of a Treatment Effect in Observational Studies Using Propensity Score Matching PDF Author: Scott F. Kosten
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Statistics
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Estimating the treatment effect between a treatment group and a control group in an observational study is a challenging problem in statistics. Without random assignment of subjects, there are likely to be differences between the treatment group and control group on a set of baseline covariates. If one of these baseline covariates is correlated to the response variable, then the difference in sample means between the groups is likely to be a biased estimate of the true treatment effect. Propensity score matching has become an increasingly popular strategy for reducing bias in estimates of the treatment effect. This reduction in bias is accomplished by identifying a subset of the original control group, which is similar to the treatment group in terms of the measured baseline covariates. Our research focused on the development of a new procedure that combines propensity score matching and a rank-based analysis of the general linear model. Our procedure was compared to several others in a Monte Carlo simulation study. Overall, our procedure produced highly efficient and robust confidence intervals for a treatment effect in an observational study. In addition to the Monte Carlo simulation study, our procedure and several other propensity score matching techniques were used to analyze two real world datasets for the presence of a treatment effect.

Propensity Scores

Propensity Scores PDF Author: Michael Alfred Posner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Abstract: Achieving unbiased estimates of the effect of a treatment on an outcome in observational (non-random) studies is crucial. The propensity score (the probability that a person is treated, conditional on measured covariates) has been widely used over the past two decades to address such problems. I present three topics in propensity score research. First, I examine when propensity scores correct the bias that can occur when standard regression techniques are applied to observational data. I show, conceptually and via simulation, that this potential exists only in the presence of (1) differing covariate distributions between treatment groups and (2) model misspecification. In comparing crude (unadjusted) estimates, covariate adjustment through standard regression (SR), and propensity scores, only the last produces unbiased estimates of treatment effect. I then compare SR to propensity score and instrumental variable analyses (IVA). SR can lead to biased estimates of treatment effects in the presence of bias from standard regression. Propensity score techniques reduce bias by comparing treated and untreated observations with similar measured characteristics. Only IVA can effectively address bias due to differences in unmeasured covariates. However, IVA estimates become biased when assumptions are not met. Propensity score methods use sub-sampling or weighting to choose an analytic sample with similar (measured) characteristics for treated and untreated cases. I review existing methods of sample selection/weighting and propose two new methods---weighting within strata (WWS) and proportional weighting within strata (PWWS). Weights reflect the frequency of observations in treatment groups within strata of the propensity score. PWWS addresses potentially uneven sample sizes among treatment groups in polychotomous exposures. I demonstrate that random selection within strata, WWS, and propensity score regression result in less bias than other methods. In summary, (1) propensity score methods are needed when treatment groups differ in their covariate distributions and the model is misspecified, (2) instrumental variable analyses can address imbalances in unmeasured covariates, but introduce bias when assumptions are violated, and (3) propensity score methods address bias, with random selection within strata, weighting within strata, and propensity score regression being superior to other methods.

Estimating Average Treatment Effects With Propensity Scores Estimated With Four Machine Learning Procedures

Estimating Average Treatment Effects With Propensity Scores Estimated With Four Machine Learning Procedures PDF Author: Kip Brown
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 24

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Book Description
Background: The increased availability of claims data allows one to build high dimensional datasets, rich in covariates, for accurately estimating treatment effects in medical and epidemiological cohort studies. This paper shows the full potential of machine learning for the estimation of average treatment effects with propensity score methods in a context rich and high dimensional datasets. Methods: Four different methods are used to estimate average treatment effects in the context of time to event outcomes. The four methods explored in this study are LASSO, Random Forest, Gradient Descent Boosting and Artificial Neural networks. Simulations based on an actual medical claims data set are used to assess the efficiency of these methods. The simulations are performed with over 100, 000 observations and 1,100 explanatory variables. Each method is tested on 500 datasets that are created from the original dataset, allowing us to report the mean and standard deviation of estimated average treatment effects. Results: The results are very promising for all four methods; however, LASSO, Random Forest and Gradient Boosting seem to be performing better than Random Forest. Conclusion: Machine Learning methods can be helpful for observational studies that use the propensity score when a very large number of covariates are available, the total number of observations is large, and the dependent event rare. This is an important result given the availability of big data related to Health Economics and Outcomes Research (HEOR) around the world.