Regression-Based Proximal Causal Inference

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Liu, Jiewen, Park, Chan, Li, Kendrick, Tchetgen, Eric J. Tchetgen
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Liu, Jiewen
Park, Chan
Li, Kendrick
Tchetgen, Eric J. Tchetgen
author_facet Liu, Jiewen
Park, Chan
Li, Kendrick
Tchetgen, Eric J. Tchetgen
contents Negative controls are increasingly used to evaluate the presence of potential unmeasured confounding in observational studies. Beyond the use of negative controls to detect the presence of residual confounding, proximal causal inference (PCI) was recently proposed to de-bias confounded causal effect estimates, by leveraging a pair of treatment and outcome negative control or confounding proxy variables. While formal methods for statistical inference have been developed for PCI, these methods can be challenging to implement as they involve solving complex integral equations that are typically ill-posed. We develop a regression-based PCI approach, employing two-stage generalized linear regression models (GLMs) to implement PCI, which obviates the need to solve difficult integral equations. The proposed approach has merit in that (i) it is applicable to continuous, count, and binary outcomes cases, making it relevant to a wide range of real-world applications, and (ii) it is easy to implement using off-the-shelf software for GLMs. We establish the statistical properties of regression-based PCI and illustrate their performance in both synthetic and real-world empirical applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_00335
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Regression-Based Proximal Causal Inference
Liu, Jiewen
Park, Chan
Li, Kendrick
Tchetgen, Eric J. Tchetgen
Methodology
Negative controls are increasingly used to evaluate the presence of potential unmeasured confounding in observational studies. Beyond the use of negative controls to detect the presence of residual confounding, proximal causal inference (PCI) was recently proposed to de-bias confounded causal effect estimates, by leveraging a pair of treatment and outcome negative control or confounding proxy variables. While formal methods for statistical inference have been developed for PCI, these methods can be challenging to implement as they involve solving complex integral equations that are typically ill-posed. We develop a regression-based PCI approach, employing two-stage generalized linear regression models (GLMs) to implement PCI, which obviates the need to solve difficult integral equations. The proposed approach has merit in that (i) it is applicable to continuous, count, and binary outcomes cases, making it relevant to a wide range of real-world applications, and (ii) it is easy to implement using off-the-shelf software for GLMs. We establish the statistical properties of regression-based PCI and illustrate their performance in both synthetic and real-world empirical applications.
title Regression-Based Proximal Causal Inference
topic Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.00335