论文标题

在存在未衡量的混杂的情况下,识别多种治疗的影响

Identifying effects of multiple treatments in the presence of unmeasured confounding

论文作者

Miao, Wang, Hu, Wenjie, Ogburn, Elizabeth L., Zhou, Xiaohua

论文摘要

在存在无法衡量的混杂的情况下鉴定治疗效应是社会,生物学和医学科学中的持续问题。在统计遗传学和生物信息学环境中,在与多种治疗的环境中无法衡量混淆的问题最为常见,在该设置中,研究人员在没有深入了解问题的因果方面的情况下制定了许多成功的统计策略。最近,已经进行了许多尝试来弥合这些统计方法与因果推断之间的差距,但是这些尝试已被证明是有缺陷的,要么依赖于完全参数假设。在本文中,我们提出了两种策略,以识别和估计在没有混杂的情况下多种治疗的因果关系。辅助变量接近的方法利用与结果没有因果关系的变量;在单变量混杂因素的情况下,我们的方法只需要一个辅助变量,与现有的仪器变量方法不同,这些方法需要与治疗一样多的仪器。一种替代的无效治疗方法取决于这样的假设,即至少一半的混杂处理对结果没有因果影响,但不需要先验地了解哪种治疗方法是无效的。我们的识别策略不会对结果模型施加参数假设,也不基于混杂因素的估计。本文扩展了现有的工作,并将现有的工作与单一治疗方法和在生物信息学中常用的模型进行了混淆。

Identification of treatment effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding is a persistent problem in the social, biological, and medical sciences. The problem of unmeasured confounding in settings with multiple treatments is most common in statistical genetics and bioinformatics settings, where researchers have developed many successful statistical strategies without engaging deeply with the causal aspects of the problem. Recently there have been a number of attempts to bridge the gap between these statistical approaches and causal inference, but these attempts have either been shown to be flawed or have relied on fully parametric assumptions. In this paper, we propose two strategies for identifying and estimating causal effects of multiple treatments in the presence of unmeasured confounding. The auxiliary variables approach leverages variables that are not causally associated with the outcome; in the case of a univariate confounder, our method only requires one auxiliary variable, unlike existing instrumental variable methods that would require as many instruments as there are treatments. An alternative null treatments approach relies on the assumption that at least half of the confounded treatments have no causal effect on the outcome, but does not require a priori knowledge of which treatments are null. Our identification strategies do not impose parametric assumptions on the outcome model and do not rest on estimation of the confounder. This paper extends and generalizes existing work on unmeasured confounding with a single treatment and models commonly used in bioinformatics.

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