Faculty Bibliography

Estimating the causal effect of an intervention on a population typically involves defining parameters in a nonparametric structural equation model (Pearl, 2000, Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference) in which the treatment or exposure is deterministically assigned in a static or dynamic way. We define a new causal parameter that takes into account the fact that intervention policies can result in stochastically assigned exposures. The statistical parameter that identifies the causal parameter of interest is established. Inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW), augmented IPTW (A-IPTW), and targeted maximum likelihood estimators (TMLE) are developed. A simulation study is performed to demonstrate the properties of these estimators, which include the double robustness of the A-IPTW and the TMLE. An application example using physical activity data is presented.

In this paper, we present a histogram-like estimator of a conditional density that uses cross-validation to estimate the histogram probabilities, as well as the optimal number and position of the bins. This estimator is an alternative to kernel density estimators when the dimension of the covariate vector is large. We demonstrate its applicability to estimation of Marginal Structural Model (MSM) parameters in which an initial estimator of the exposure mechanism is needed. MSM estimation based on the proposed density estimator results in less biased estimates, when compared to estimates based on a misspecified parametric model.