Encoding and inference on separable effects for sustained treatments

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Gonzalez-Perez, Ignacio, Wanis, Kerollos Nashat, Sarvet, Aaron Leor, Stensrud, Mats Julius
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Gonzalez-Perez, Ignacio
Wanis, Kerollos Nashat
Sarvet, Aaron Leor
Stensrud, Mats Julius
author_facet Gonzalez-Perez, Ignacio
Wanis, Kerollos Nashat
Sarvet, Aaron Leor
Stensrud, Mats Julius
contents Sustained treatment strategies are common in many domains, particularly in medicine, where many treatment are delivered repeatedly over time. The effects of adherence to a treatment strategy throughout follow-up are often more relevant to decision-makers than effects of treatment assignment or initiation. Here we consider the separable effect of sustained use of a time-varying treatment. Despite the potential usefulness of this estimand, the theory of separable effects has yet to be extended to settings with sustained treatment strategies. To derive our results, we use an unconventional encoding of time-varying treatment strategies. This allows us to obtain concise formulations of identifying assumptions with better practical properties; for example, they admit frugal graphical representations and formulations of identifying functionals. These functionals are used to motivate doubly robust semiparametrically efficient estimators. The results are applied to the Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial (SPRINT), where we estimate a separable effect of modified blood pressure treatments on the risk of acute kidney injury.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_10702
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Encoding and inference on separable effects for sustained treatments
Gonzalez-Perez, Ignacio
Wanis, Kerollos Nashat
Sarvet, Aaron Leor
Stensrud, Mats Julius
Methodology
Sustained treatment strategies are common in many domains, particularly in medicine, where many treatment are delivered repeatedly over time. The effects of adherence to a treatment strategy throughout follow-up are often more relevant to decision-makers than effects of treatment assignment or initiation. Here we consider the separable effect of sustained use of a time-varying treatment. Despite the potential usefulness of this estimand, the theory of separable effects has yet to be extended to settings with sustained treatment strategies. To derive our results, we use an unconventional encoding of time-varying treatment strategies. This allows us to obtain concise formulations of identifying assumptions with better practical properties; for example, they admit frugal graphical representations and formulations of identifying functionals. These functionals are used to motivate doubly robust semiparametrically efficient estimators. The results are applied to the Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial (SPRINT), where we estimate a separable effect of modified blood pressure treatments on the risk of acute kidney injury.
title Encoding and inference on separable effects for sustained treatments
topic Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10702