Causal inference when counterfactuals depend on the proportion of all subjects exposed

DOI10.1111/BIOM.13034zbMATH Open1436.62607arXiv1710.09588OpenAlexW2901796322WikidataQ91325151 ScholiaQ91325151MaRDI QIDQ5214545FDOQ5214545

Maya Petersen, Caleb H. Miles, Mark J. Van der Laan

Publication date: 7 February 2020

Published in: Biometrics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: The assumption that no subject's exposure affects another subject's outcome, known as the no-interference assumption, has long held a foundational position in the study of causal inference. However, this assumption may be violated in many settings, and in recent years has been relaxed considerably. Often this has been achieved with either the aid of a known underlying network, or the assumption that the population can be partitioned into separate groups, between which there is no interference, and within which each subject's outcome may be affected by all the other subjects in the group via the proportion exposed (the stratified interference assumption). In this paper, we instead consider a complete interference setting, in which each subject affects every other subject's outcome. In particular, we make the stratified interference assumption for a single group consisting of the entire sample. This can occur when the exposure is a shared resource whose efficacy is modified by the number of subjects among whom it is shared. We show that a targeted maximum likelihood estimator for the i.i.d.~setting can be used to estimate a class of causal parameters that includes direct effects and overall effects under certain interventions. This estimator remains doubly-robust, semiparametric efficient, and continues to allow for incorporation of machine learning under our model. We conduct a simulation study, and present results from a data application where we study the effect of a nurse-based triage system on the outcomes of patients receiving HIV care in Kenyan health clinics.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09588

zbMATH Keywords

causal inferencesemiparametric estimationdependent datainterferenceHIV/AIDSSUTVA

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Nonparametric estimation (62G05) Applications of statistics to biology and medical sciences; meta analysis (62P10)

Cited In (5)

• Assessing HIV-infected patient retention in a program of differentiated care in sub-Saharan Africa: a G-estimation approach
• Causal inference through a witness protection program
• Estimating a Marginal Causal Odds Ratio Subject to Confounding
• Statistical Inference and Power Analysis for Direct and Spillover Effects in Two-Stage Randomized Experiments
• Nonparametric doubly robust estimation of causal effect on networks in observational studies

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