Targeted smooth Bayesian causal forests: an analysis of heterogeneous treatment effects for simultaneous vs. interval medical abortion regimens over gestation

DOI10.1214/20-AOAS1438zbMATH Open1478.62344arXiv1905.09405OpenAlexW3203693889MaRDI QIDQ2247463FDOQ2247463

James G. Scott, Jennifer E. Starling, Jared S. Murray, Abigail R. A. Aiken, Carlos M. Carvalho, Patricia A. Lohr

Publication date: 17 November 2021

Published in: The Annals of Applied Statistics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: We introduce Targeted Smooth Bayesian Causal Forests (tsBCF), a nonparametric Bayesian approach for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects which vary smoothly over a single covariate in the observational data setting. The tsBCF method induces smoothness by parameterizing terminal tree nodes with smooth functions, and allows for separate regularization of treatment effects versus prognostic effect of control covariates. Smoothing parameters for prognostic and treatment effects can be chosen to reflect prior knowledge or tuned in a data-dependent way. We use tsBCF to analyze a new clinical protocol for early medical abortion. Our aim is to assess relative effectiveness of simultaneous versus interval administration of mifepristone and misoprostol over the first nine weeks of gestation. The model reflects our expectation that the relative effectiveness varies smoothly over gestation, but not necessarily over other covariates. We demonstrate the performance of the tsBCF method on benchmarking experiments. Software for tsBCF is available at https://github.com/jestarling/tsbcf/.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.09405

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zbMATH Keywords

causal inferenceregularizationGaussian processheterogeneous treatment effectsBayesian additive regression tree

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Nonparametric estimation (62G05) Classification and discrimination; cluster analysis (statistical aspects) (62H30) Applications of statistics to biology and medical sciences; meta analysis (62P10) Gaussian processes (60G15) Probabilistic graphical models (62H22)

Cites Work

• BART: Bayesian additive regression trees
• Bayesian additive regression trees using Bayesian model averaging
• BART with targeted smoothing: an analysis of patient-specific stillbirth risk
• Bayesian Treed Gaussian Process Models With an Application to Computer Modeling
• Estimation and Inference of Heterogeneous Treatment Effects using Random Forests
• Causal Inference for Statistics, Social, and Biomedical Sciences
• Bayesian Analysis of Binary and Polychotomous Response Data
• The central role of the propensity score in observational studies for causal effects
• Prior distributions for variance parameters in hierarchical models (Comment on article by Browne and Draper)
• Bayesian regression tree models for causal inference: regularization, confounding, and heterogeneous effects (with discussion)
• Bayesian Regression Trees for High-Dimensional Prediction and Variable Selection
• Regularization and confounding in linear regression for treatment effect estimation
• Bayesian Regression Tree Ensembles that Adapt to Smoothness and Sparsity

Cited In (3)

• Hierarchical Bayesian bootstrap for heterogeneous treatment effect estimation
• tsBCF
• Shrinkage Bayesian Causal Forests for Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Estimation

Uses Software

• BART-BMA
• grf
• tsbart
• GitHub
• BartPy
• possum

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