Double Machine Learning Methods for Estimating Average Treatment Effects: A Comparative Study

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Tan, Xiaoqing, Yang, Shu, Ye, Wenyu, Faries, Douglas E., Lipkovich, Ilya, Kadziola, Zbigniew
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2022
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author Tan, Xiaoqing
Yang, Shu
Ye, Wenyu
Faries, Douglas E.
Lipkovich, Ilya
Kadziola, Zbigniew
author_facet Tan, Xiaoqing
Yang, Shu
Ye, Wenyu
Faries, Douglas E.
Lipkovich, Ilya
Kadziola, Zbigniew
contents Observational cohort studies are increasingly being used for comparative effectiveness research to assess the safety of therapeutics. Recently, various doubly robust methods have been proposed for average treatment effect estimation by combining the treatment model and the outcome model via different vehicles, such as matching, weighting, and regression. The key advantage of doubly robust estimators is that they require either the treatment model or the outcome model to be correctly specified to obtain a consistent estimator of average treatment effects, and therefore lead to a more accurate and often more precise inference. However, little work has been done to understand how doubly robust estimators differ due to their unique strategies of using the treatment and outcome models and how machine learning techniques can be combined to boost their performance, which we call double machine learning estimators. Here we examine multiple popular doubly robust methods and compare their performance using different treatment and outcome modeling via extensive simulations and a real-world application. We found that incorporating machine learning with doubly robust estimators such as the targeted maximum likelihood estimator gives the best overall performance. Practical guidance on how to apply doubly robust estimators is provided.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2204_10969
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Double Machine Learning Methods for Estimating Average Treatment Effects: A Comparative Study
Tan, Xiaoqing
Yang, Shu
Ye, Wenyu
Faries, Douglas E.
Lipkovich, Ilya
Kadziola, Zbigniew
Methodology
Applications
Machine Learning
Observational cohort studies are increasingly being used for comparative effectiveness research to assess the safety of therapeutics. Recently, various doubly robust methods have been proposed for average treatment effect estimation by combining the treatment model and the outcome model via different vehicles, such as matching, weighting, and regression. The key advantage of doubly robust estimators is that they require either the treatment model or the outcome model to be correctly specified to obtain a consistent estimator of average treatment effects, and therefore lead to a more accurate and often more precise inference. However, little work has been done to understand how doubly robust estimators differ due to their unique strategies of using the treatment and outcome models and how machine learning techniques can be combined to boost their performance, which we call double machine learning estimators. Here we examine multiple popular doubly robust methods and compare their performance using different treatment and outcome modeling via extensive simulations and a real-world application. We found that incorporating machine learning with doubly robust estimators such as the targeted maximum likelihood estimator gives the best overall performance. Practical guidance on how to apply doubly robust estimators is provided.
title Double Machine Learning Methods for Estimating Average Treatment Effects: A Comparative Study
topic Methodology
Applications
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.10969