Novel criteria to exclude the surrogate paradox and their optimalities

DOI10.1111/SJOS.12398zbMATH Open1446.62040arXiv1607.05454OpenAlexW2964028530WikidataQ127672969 ScholiaQ127672969MaRDI QIDQ5108973FDOQ5108973

Authors: Yunjian Yin, Lan Liu, Zhi Geng, Peng Luo 

Publication date: 7 May 2020

Published in: Scandinavian Journal of Statistics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: When the primary outcome is hard to collect, surrogate endpoint is typically used as a substitute. However, even when the treatment has a positive average causal effect (ACE) on the surrogate endpoint, which also has a positive ACE on the primary outcome, it is still possible that the treatment has a negative ACE on the primary outcome. Such a phenomenon is called the surrogate paradox and greatly challenges the use of surrogate. In this paper, we provide novel criteria to exclude the surrogate paradox. Unlike other conditions previously proposed, our conditions are testable since they only involve observed data. Furthermore, our criteria are optimal in the sense that they are sufficient and "almost necessary" to exclude the paradox: if the conditions are satisfied, the surrogate paradox is guaranteed to be absent while if the conditions fail, there exists a data generating process with surrogate paradox that can generate the same observed data. That is, our criteria capture all the information in the observed data to exclude the surrogate paradox rather than relying on unverifiable distributional assumptions.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.05454

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zbMATH Keywords

linear programmingoptimalityaverage causal effectsurrogate paradox

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Foundations and philosophical topics in statistics (62A01) Optimal statistical designs (62K05) Linear programming (90C05) Fractional programming (90C32)

Cited In (2)

• Criteria for multiple surrogates
• Surrogate measures and consistent surrogates

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