Discovery of Critical Thresholds in Mixed Exposures and Estimation of Policy Intervention Effects using Targeted Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: McCoy, David, Hubbard, Alan, Schuler, Alejandro, van der Laan, Mark
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author McCoy, David
Hubbard, Alan
Schuler, Alejandro
van der Laan, Mark
author_facet McCoy, David
Hubbard, Alan
Schuler, Alejandro
van der Laan, Mark
contents Traditional regulations of chemical exposure tend to focus on single exposures, overlooking the potential amplified toxicity due to multiple concurrent exposures. We are interested in understanding the average outcome if exposures were limited to fall under a multivariate threshold. Because threshold levels are often unknown a priori, we provide an algorithm that finds exposure threshold levels where the expected outcome is maximized or minimized. Because both identifying thresholds and estimating policy effects on the same data would lead to overfitting bias, we also provide a data-adaptive estimation framework, which allows for both threshold discovery and policy estimation. Simulation studies show asymptotic convergence to the optimal exposure region and to the true effect of an intervention. We demonstrate how our method identifies true interactions in a public synthetic mixture data set. Finally, we applied our method to NHANES data to discover metal exposures that have the most harmful effects on telomere length. We provide an implementation in the CVtreeMLE R package.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2302_07976
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Discovery of Critical Thresholds in Mixed Exposures and Estimation of Policy Intervention Effects using Targeted Learning
McCoy, David
Hubbard, Alan
Schuler, Alejandro
van der Laan, Mark
Methodology
Traditional regulations of chemical exposure tend to focus on single exposures, overlooking the potential amplified toxicity due to multiple concurrent exposures. We are interested in understanding the average outcome if exposures were limited to fall under a multivariate threshold. Because threshold levels are often unknown a priori, we provide an algorithm that finds exposure threshold levels where the expected outcome is maximized or minimized. Because both identifying thresholds and estimating policy effects on the same data would lead to overfitting bias, we also provide a data-adaptive estimation framework, which allows for both threshold discovery and policy estimation. Simulation studies show asymptotic convergence to the optimal exposure region and to the true effect of an intervention. We demonstrate how our method identifies true interactions in a public synthetic mixture data set. Finally, we applied our method to NHANES data to discover metal exposures that have the most harmful effects on telomere length. We provide an implementation in the CVtreeMLE R package.
title Discovery of Critical Thresholds in Mixed Exposures and Estimation of Policy Intervention Effects using Targeted Learning
topic Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.07976