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Main Authors: Xu, Shenbo, Cobzaru, Raluca, Finkelstein, Stan N., Welsch, Roy E., Ng, Kenney, Shahn, Zach
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11263
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author Xu, Shenbo
Cobzaru, Raluca
Finkelstein, Stan N.
Welsch, Roy E.
Ng, Kenney
Shahn, Zach
author_facet Xu, Shenbo
Cobzaru, Raluca
Finkelstein, Stan N.
Welsch, Roy E.
Ng, Kenney
Shahn, Zach
contents Methods for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) from observational data have largely focused on continuous or binary outcomes, with less attention paid to survival outcomes and almost none to settings with competing risks. In this work, we develop censoring unbiased transformations (CUTs) for survival outcomes both with and without competing risks. After converting time-to-event outcomes using these CUTs, direct application of HTE learners for continuous outcomes yields consistent estimates of heterogeneous cumulative incidence effects, total effects, and separable direct effects. Our CUTs enable application of a much larger set of state of the art HTE learners for censored outcomes than had previously been available, especially in competing risks settings. We provide generic model-free learner-specific oracle inequalities bounding the finite-sample excess risk. The oracle efficiency results depend on the oracle selector and estimated nuisance functions from all steps involved in the transformation. We demonstrate the empirical performance of the proposed methods in simulation studies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_11263
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects on Survival Outcomes Using Counterfactual Censoring Unbiased Transformations
Xu, Shenbo
Cobzaru, Raluca
Finkelstein, Stan N.
Welsch, Roy E.
Ng, Kenney
Shahn, Zach
Methodology
Machine Learning
Methods for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) from observational data have largely focused on continuous or binary outcomes, with less attention paid to survival outcomes and almost none to settings with competing risks. In this work, we develop censoring unbiased transformations (CUTs) for survival outcomes both with and without competing risks. After converting time-to-event outcomes using these CUTs, direct application of HTE learners for continuous outcomes yields consistent estimates of heterogeneous cumulative incidence effects, total effects, and separable direct effects. Our CUTs enable application of a much larger set of state of the art HTE learners for censored outcomes than had previously been available, especially in competing risks settings. We provide generic model-free learner-specific oracle inequalities bounding the finite-sample excess risk. The oracle efficiency results depend on the oracle selector and estimated nuisance functions from all steps involved in the transformation. We demonstrate the empirical performance of the proposed methods in simulation studies.
title Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects on Survival Outcomes Using Counterfactual Censoring Unbiased Transformations
topic Methodology
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11263