Incorporating Auxiliary Variables to Improve the Efficiency of Time-Varying Treatment Effect Estimation

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Hauptverfasser: Shi, Jieru, Wu, Zhenke, Dempsey, Walter
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Shi, Jieru
Wu, Zhenke
Dempsey, Walter
author_facet Shi, Jieru
Wu, Zhenke
Dempsey, Walter
contents Contextual sensing and delivery of digital interventions to improve health outcomes have gained significant traction in behavioral and psychiatric studies. Micro-randomized trials (MRTs) are a common experimental design for obtaining data-driven evidence on the effectiveness of digital interventions where each individual is repeatedly randomized to receive treatments over numerous time points. Throughout the study, individual characteristics and contextual factors around randomization are collected, with some prespecified as moderators for assessing time-varying causal effect moderation. However, many additional measurements beyond these moderators often go underutilized. Some of these may influence treatment randomization or known to strongly moderate the treatment effect. Incorporating such auxiliary information into the estimation procedure can reduce chance imbalances and improve asymptotic estimation efficiency. In this work, we propose a method to adjust for auxiliary variables in consistently estimating time-varying intervention effects. The approach can also be extended to include post-treatment auxiliary variables when evaluating lagged treatment effects. Under specific conditions, local efficiency gains are guaranteed. We demonstrate the method's utility through simulation studies and an analysis of data from the Intern Health Study (NeCamp et al., 2020).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2306_17260
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Incorporating Auxiliary Variables to Improve the Efficiency of Time-Varying Treatment Effect Estimation
Shi, Jieru
Wu, Zhenke
Dempsey, Walter
Methodology
Statistics Theory
Contextual sensing and delivery of digital interventions to improve health outcomes have gained significant traction in behavioral and psychiatric studies. Micro-randomized trials (MRTs) are a common experimental design for obtaining data-driven evidence on the effectiveness of digital interventions where each individual is repeatedly randomized to receive treatments over numerous time points. Throughout the study, individual characteristics and contextual factors around randomization are collected, with some prespecified as moderators for assessing time-varying causal effect moderation. However, many additional measurements beyond these moderators often go underutilized. Some of these may influence treatment randomization or known to strongly moderate the treatment effect. Incorporating such auxiliary information into the estimation procedure can reduce chance imbalances and improve asymptotic estimation efficiency. In this work, we propose a method to adjust for auxiliary variables in consistently estimating time-varying intervention effects. The approach can also be extended to include post-treatment auxiliary variables when evaluating lagged treatment effects. Under specific conditions, local efficiency gains are guaranteed. We demonstrate the method's utility through simulation studies and an analysis of data from the Intern Health Study (NeCamp et al., 2020).
title Incorporating Auxiliary Variables to Improve the Efficiency of Time-Varying Treatment Effect Estimation
topic Methodology
Statistics Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.17260