Comment: The Essential Role of Pair Matching

Comment: The Essential Role of Pair Matching in Cluster-Randomized Experiments, with Application to the Mexican Universal Health Insurance Evaluation

Comment on ``The Essential Role of Pair Matching in Cluster-Randomized Experiments, with Application to the Mexican Universal Health Insurance Evaluation'' [arXiv:0910.3752]

The Essential Role of Pair Matching in Cluster-Randomized Experiments, with Application to the Mexican Universal Health Insurance Evaluation

A basic feature of many field experiments is that investigators are only able to randomize clusters of individuals--such as households, communities, firms, medical practices, schools or classrooms--even when the individual is the unit of interest. To recoup the resulting efficiency loss, some studies pair similar clusters and randomize treatment within pairs. However, many other studies avoid pairing, in part because of claims in the literature, echoed by clinical trials standards organizations, that this matched-pair, cluster-randomization design has serious problems. We argue that all such c…

A Comment on "Cycles and Instability in a Rock-Paper-Scissors Population Game: A Continuous Time Experiment"

The authors (Cason, Friedman and Hopkins, Reviews of Economics Studies, 2014) claimed a result that the treatments (using simultaneous matching in discrete time) replicate previous results that exhibit weak or no cycles. After correct two mathematical mistakes in their cycles tripwire algorithm, we research the cycles by scanning the tripwire in the full strategy space of the games and we find significant cycles missed by the authors. So we suggest that, all of the treatments (using simultaneous matching in discrete time) exhibit significant cycles.

对话的催化剂：探讨阿尔茨海默病在线社区中主题发起者与评论者之间的互动动态

Catalysts of Conversation: Examining Interaction Dynamics Between Topic Initiators and Commentors in Alzheimer's Disease Online Communities

本研究通过倾向得分匹配等方法分析两个ADRD在线社区，发现主题发起者的积极参与和互惠回复能显著提升评论量，且不同话题与评论语言特征对用户互动有不同影响，为增强健康在线社区可持续性提供了策略。

Effect modification in anchored indirect treatment comparisons: Comments on "Matching-adjusted indirect comparisons: Application to time-to-event data"

This commentary regards a recent simulation study conducted by Aouni, Gaudel-Dedieu and Sebastien, evaluating the performance of different versions of matching-adjusted indirect comparison (MAIC) in an anchored scenario with a common comparator. The simulation study uses survival outcomes and the Cox proportional hazards regression as the outcome model. It concludes that using the LASSO for variable selection is preferable to balancing a maximal set of covariates. However, there are no treatment effect modifiers in imbalance in the study. The LASSO is more efficient because it selects a subset…

How (not) to assess the importance of correlations for the matching of spontaneous and evoked activity

A comment on `Population rate dynamics and multineuron firing patterns in sensory cortex' by Okun et al. Journal of Neuroscience 32(48):17108-17119, 2012 and our response to the corresponding reply by Okun et al's (arXiv, 2013).