A spectral adjustment for spatial confounding
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Publication:64773
DOI10.48550/ARXIV.2012.11767OpenAlexW3116723147MaRDI QIDQ64773FDOQ64773
Authors: Yawen Guan, Garritt L. Page, Brian J Reich, Massimo Ventrucci, Shu Yang, Yawen Guan, Garritt L. Page, Brian J. Reich, Massimo Ventrucci, Shu Yang 
Publication date: 22 December 2020
Published in: Biometrika (Search for Journal in Brave)
Abstract: Adjusting for an unmeasured confounder is generally an intractable problem, but in the spatial setting it may be possible under certain conditions. In this paper, we derive necessary conditions on the coherence between the treatment variable of interest and the unmeasured confounder that ensure the causal effect of the treatment is estimable. We specify our model and assumptions in the spectral domain to allow for different degrees of confounding at different spatial resolutions. The key assumption that ensures identifiability is that confounding present at global scales dissipates at local scales. We show that this assumption in the spectral domain is equivalent to adjusting for global-scale confounding in the spatial domain by adding a spatially smoothed version of the treatment variable to the mean of the response variable. Within this general framework, we propose a sequence of confounder adjustment methods that range from parametric adjustments based on the Matern coherence function to more robust semi-parametric methods that use smoothing splines. These ideas are applied to areal and geostatistical data for both simulated and real datasets
Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.11767
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