Causal inference in the context of an error prone exposure: air pollution and mortality

DOI10.1214/18-AOAS1206MaRDI QIDQ2415478zbMATH OpenWikidataFDO

Authors Xiao Wu, Danielle Braun, Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou, Christine Choirat, Qian Di, Francesca Dominici

Publication date 22 May 2019

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

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.00642, https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoas/1554861659

zbMATH Keywords

air pollutioncausal inferenceenvironmental epidemiologygeneralized propensity scoresmeasurement errorobservational studyregression calibration

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Ridge regression; shrinkage estimators (Lasso) (62J07) Applications of statistics to biology and medical sciences; meta analysis (62P10) Applications of statistics to environmental and related topics (62P12) Epidemiology (92D30)

Abstract: We propose a new approach for estimating causal effects when the exposure is measured with error and confounding adjustment is performed via a generalized propensity score (GPS). Using validation data, we propose a regression calibration (RC)-based adjustment for a continuous error-prone exposure combined with GPS to adjust for confounding (RC-GPS). The outcome analysis is conducted after transforming the corrected continuous exposure into a categorical exposure. We consider confounding adjustment in the context of GPS subclassification, inverse probability treatment weighting (IPTW) and matching. In simulations with varying degrees of exposure error and confounding bias, RC-GPS eliminates bias from exposure error and confounding compared to standard approaches that rely on the error-prone exposure. We applied RC-GPS to a rich data platform to estimate the causal effect of long-term exposure to fine particles ($P{M}_{2.5}$) on mortality in New England for the period from 2000 to 2012. The main study consists of $2,202$ zip codes covered by $217,660$ 1km $imes$ 1km grid cells with yearly mortality rates, yearly $P{M}_{2.5}$ averages estimated from a spatio-temporal model (error-prone exposure) and several potential confounders. The internal validation study includes a subset of 83 1km $imes$ 1km grid cells within 75 zip codes from the main study with error-free yearly $P{M}_{2.5}$ exposures obtained from monitor stations. Under assumptions of non-interference and weak unconfoundedness, using matching we found that exposure to moderate levels of $P{M}_{2.5}$ ($8<$ $P{M}_{2.5}$ $leq10mmug/m^3$) causes a $2.8\mathrm{\%}$ ($95\mathrm{\%}$ CI: $0.6\mathrm{\%},3.6\mathrm{\%}$) increase in all-cause mortality compared to low exposure ($P{M}_{2.5}$ $leq8mmug/m^3$).

Recommendations

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Cited in

(6)

• A causal exposure response function with local adjustment for confounding: estimating health effects of exposure to low levels of ambient fine particulate matter
• Discovering heterogeneous exposure effects using randomization inference in air pollution studies
• Estimating the effects of fine particulate matter on 432 cardiovascular diseases using multi-outcome regression with tree-structured shrinkage
• Estimating a causal exposure response function with a continuous error-prone exposure: a study of fine particulate matter and all-cause mortality
• Matching on Generalized Propensity Scores with Continuous Exposures
• Controlling for unmeasured confounding and spatial misalignment in long‐term air pollution and health studies

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