Amidst rising appreciation for privacy and data usage rights, researchers have increasingly acknowledged the principle of data minimization, which holds that the accessibility, collection, and retention of subjects' data should be kept to the bare amount needed to answer focused research questions. Applying this principle to randomized controlled trials (RCTs), this paper presents algorithms for making accurate inferences from RCTs under stringent data retention and anonymization policies. In particular, we show how to use recursive algorithms to construct running estimates of treatment effects in RCTs, which allow individualized records to be deleted or anonymized shortly after collection. Devoting special attention to non-i.i.d. data, we further show how to draw robust inferences from RCTs by combining recursive algorithms with bootstrap and federated strategies.
We consider methods for causal inference in randomized trials nested within cohorts of trial-eligible individuals, including those who are not randomized. We show how baseline covariate data from the entire cohort, and treatment and outcome data only from randomized individuals, can be used to identify potential (counterfactual) outcome means and average treatment effects in the target population of all eligible individuals. We review identifiability conditions, propose estimators, and assess the estimators' finite-sample performance in simulation studies. As an illustration, we apply the esti…
The objective of this paper is to develop statistical methodology for planning and evaluating three-armed non-inferiority trials for general retention of effect hypotheses, where the endpoint of interest may follow any (regular) parametric distribution family. This generalizes and unifies specific results for binary, normally and exponentially distributed endpoints. We propose a Wald-type test procedure for the retention of effect hypothesis (RET), which assures that the test treatment maintains at least a proportion $Δ$ of reference treatment effect compared to placebo. At this, we distinguis…
We describe methods that extend (generalize or transport) causal inferences from cluster randomized trials to a target population of clusters, under a general nonparametric model that allows for arbitrary within-cluster dependence. We propose doubly robust estimators of potential outcome means in the target population that exploit individual-level data on covariates and outcomes to improve efficiency and are appropriate for use with machine learning methods. We illustrate the methods using a cluster randomized trial of influenza vaccination strategies conducted in 818 nursing homes nested in a…
When treatment effect modifiers influence the decision to participate in a randomized trial, the average treatment effect in the population represented by the randomized individuals will differ from the effect in other populations. In this tutorial, we consider methods for extending causal inferences about time-fixed treatments from a trial to a new target population of non-participants, using data from a completed randomized trial and baseline covariate data from a sample from the target population. We examine methods based on modeling the expectation of the outcome, the probability of partic…
The micro-randomized trial (MRT) is a new experimental design which allows for the investigation of the proximal effects of a "just-in-time" treatment, often provided via a mobile device as part of a mobile health intervention. As with a traditional randomized controlled trial, computing the minimum required sample size to achieve a desired power is a crucial step in designing an MRT. We present MRT-SS Calculator, an online sample-size calculator for micro-randomized trials, built with R Shiny. MRT-SS Calculator requires specification of time-varying patterns for the proximal treatment effect …
Numerous publications have now addressed the principles of designing, analyzing, and reporting the results of, stepped-wedge cluster randomized trials. In contrast, there is little research available pertaining to the design and analysis of multi-arm stepped-wedge cluster randomized trials, utilized to evaluate the effectiveness of multiple experimental interventions. In this paper, we address this by explaining how the required sample size in these multi-arm trials can be ascertained when data are to be analyzed using a linear mixed model. We then go on to describe how the design of such tria…
We examine study designs for extending (generalizing or transporting) causal inferences from a randomized trial to a target population. Specifically, we consider nested trial designs, where randomized individuals are nested within a sample from the target population, and non-nested trial designs, including composite dataset designs, where a randomized trial is combined with a separately obtained sample of non-randomized individuals from the target population. We show that the causal quantities that can be identified in each study design depend on what is known about the probability of sampling…
When individuals participating in a randomized trial differ with respect to the distribution of effect modifiers compared compared with the target population where the trial results will be used, treatment effect estimates from the trial may not directly apply to target population. Methods for extending -- generalizing or transporting -- causal inferences from the trial to the target population rely on conditional exchangeability assumptions between randomized and non-randomized individuals. The validity of these assumptions is often uncertain or controversial and investigators need to examine…
Brown University School of Public Health（布朗大学公共卫生学院）；Center for Gerontology and Health Care Research, Brown University School of Public Health（布朗大学公共卫生学院老年学与医疗保健研究中心）；Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health（哈佛陈曾熙公共卫生学院）；Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Center for Outcomes Research, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School（理查德·A和苏珊·F·史密斯结果研究中心，贝斯以色列女执事医疗中心，哈佛医学院）
We develop a Bayesian nonparametric (BNP) approach to evaluate the causal effect of treatment in a randomized trial where a nonterminal event may be censored by a terminal event, but not vice versa (i.e., semi-competing risks). Based on the idea of principal stratification, we define a novel estimand for the causal effect of treatment on the nonterminal event. We introduce identification assumptions, indexed by a sensitivity parameter, and show how to draw inference using our BNP approach. We conduct simulation studies and illustrate our methodology using data from a brain cancer trial.
Clinical trials with a hybrid control arm (a control arm constructed from a combination of randomized patients and real-world data on patients receiving usual care in standard clinical practice) have the potential to decrease the cost of randomized trials while increasing the proportion of trial patients given access to novel therapeutics. However, due to stringent trial inclusion criteria and differences in care and data quality between trials and community practice, trial patients may have systematically different outcomes compared to their real-world counterparts. We propose a new method fo…
Extending (generalizing or transporting) causal inferences from a randomized trial to a target population requires ``generalizability'' or ``transportability'' assumptions, which state that randomized and non-randomized individuals are exchangeable conditional on baseline covariates. These assumptions are made on the basis of background knowledge, which is often uncertain or controversial, and need to be subjected to sensitivity analysis. We present simple methods for sensitivity analyses that do not require detailed background knowledge about specific unknown or unmeasured determinants of the…
Methods for extending -- generalizing or transporting -- inferences from a randomized trial to a target population involve conditioning on a large set of covariates that is sufficient for rendering the randomized and non-randomized groups exchangeable. Yet, decision-makers are often interested in examining treatment effects in subgroups of the target population defined in terms of only a few discrete covariates. Here, we propose methods for estimating subgroup-specific potential outcome means and average treatment effects in generalizability and transportability analyses, using outcome model-b…
When engagement with a randomized trial is driven by factors that affect the outcome or when trial engagement directly affects the outcome independent of treatment, the average treatment effect among trial participants is unlikely to generalize to a target population. In this paper, we use counterfactual and graphical causal models to examine under what conditions we can generalize causal inferences from a randomized trial to the target population of trial-eligible individuals. We offer an interpretation of generalizability analyses using the notion of a hypothetical intervention to "scale-up"…
The use and development of mobile interventions are experiencing rapid growth. In "just-in-time" mobile interventions, treatments are provided via a mobile device and they are intended to help an individual make healthy decisions "in the moment," and thus have a proximal, near future impact. Currently the development of mobile interventions is proceeding at a much faster pace than that of associated data science methods. A first step toward developing data-based methods is to provide an experimental design for testing the proximal effects of these just-in-time treatments. In this paper, we pro…
Pragmatic randomized trials are designed to provide evidence for clinical decision-making rather than regulatory approval. Common features of these trials include the inclusion of heterogeneous or diverse patient populations in a wide range of care settings, the use of active treatment strategies as comparators, unblinded treatment assignment, and the study of long-term, clinically relevant outcomes. These features can greatly increase the usefulness of the trial results for patients, clinicians, and other stakeholders. However, these features also introduce an increased risk of non-adherence,…
The primary analysis of randomized screening trials for cancer typically adheres to the intention-to-screen principle, measuring cancer-specific mortality reductions between screening and control arms. These mortality reductions result from a combination of the screening regimen, screening technology and the effect of the early, screening-induced, treatment. This motivates addressing these different aspects separately. Here we are interested in the causal effect of early versus delayed treatments on cancer mortality among the screening-detectable subgroup, which under certain assumptions is es…
We often seek to estimate the causal effect of an exposure on a particular outcome in both randomized and observational settings. One such estimation method is the covariate-adjusted residuals estimator, which was designed for individually or cluster randomized trials. In this manuscript, we study the properties of this estimator and develop a new estimator that utilizes both covariate adjustment and inverse probability weighting We support our theoretical results with a simulation study and an application in an infectious disease setting. The covariate-adjusted residuals estimator is an effic…
We present methods for causally interpretable meta-analyses that combine information from multiple randomized trials to estimate potential (counterfactual) outcome means and average treatment effects in a target population. We consider identifiability conditions, derive implications of the conditions for the law of the observed data, and obtain identification results for transporting causal inferences from a collection of independent randomized trials to a new target population in which experimental data may not be available. We propose an estimator for the potential (counterfactual) outcome m…
Background: Randomized controlled trials are often used to inform policy and practice for broad populations. The average treatment effect (ATE) for a target population, however, may be different from the ATE observed in a trial if there are effect modifiers whose distribution in the target population is different that from that in the trial. Methods exist to use trial data to estimate the target population ATE, provided the distributions of treatment effect modifiers are observed in both the trial and target population -- an assumption that may not hold in practice. Methods: The proposed sensi…
To improve precision of estimation and power of testing hypothesis for an unconditional treatment effect in randomized clinical trials with binary outcomes, researchers and regulatory agencies recommend using g-computation as a reliable method of covariate adjustment. However, the practical application of g-computation is hindered by the lack of an explicit robust variance formula that can be used for different unconditional treatment effects of interest. To fill this gap, we provide explicit and robust variance estimators for g-computation estimators and demonstrate through simulations that t…
The ability to generalize experimental results from randomized control trials (RCTs) across locations is crucial for informing policy decisions in targeted regions. Such generalization is often hindered by the lack of identifiability due to unmeasured effect modifiers that compromise direct transport of treatment effect estimates from one location to another. We build upon sensitivity analysis in observational studies and propose an optimization procedure that allows us to get bounds on the treatment effects in targeted regions. Furthermore, we construct more informative bounds by balancing on…
We propose new, optimal methods for analyzing randomized trials, when it is suspected that treatment effects may differ in two predefined subpopulations. Such sub-populations could be defined by a biomarker or risk factor measured at baseline. The goal is to simultaneously learn which subpopulations benefit from an experimental treatment, while providing strong control of the familywise Type I error rate. We formalize this as a multiple testing problem and show it is computationally infeasible to solve using existing techniques. Our solution involves a novel approach, in which we first transfo…
Cluster-randomized trials (CRTs) involve randomizing entire groups of participants -- called clusters -- to treatment arms but are often comprised of a limited or fixed number of available clusters. While covariate adjustment can account for chance imbalances between treatment arms and increase statistical efficiency in individually-randomized trials, analytical methods for individual-level covariate adjustment in small CRTs have received little attention to date. In this paper, we systematically investigate, through extensive simulations, the operating characteristics of propensity score weig…
The micro-randomized trial (MRT) is an experimental design that can be used to develop optimal mobile health interventions. In MRTs, interventions in the form of notifications or messages are sent through smart phones to individuals, targeting a health-related outcome such as physical activity or weight management. Often, mobile health interventions have a social media component; an individual's outcome could thus depend on other individuals' treatments and outcomes. In this paper, we study the micro-randomized trial in the presence of such cross-unit interference. We model the cross-unit inte…
Many policy evaluations occur in settings where treatment is randomized at the cluster level, and there is treatment noncompliance within each cluster. For example, villages might be assigned to treatment and control, but residents in each village may choose to comply or not with their assigned treatment status. When noncompliance is present, the instrumental variables framework can be used to identify and estimate causal effects. While a large literature exists on instrumental variables estimation methods, relatively little work has been focused on settings with clustered treatments. Here, we…
I develop a model of a randomized experiment with a binary intervention and a binary outcome. Potential outcomes in the intervention and control groups give rise to four types of participants. Fixing ideas such that the outcome is mortality, some participants would live regardless, others would be saved, others would be killed, and others would die regardless. These potential outcome types are not observable. However, I use the model to develop estimators of the number of participants of each type. The model relies on the randomization within the experiment and on deductive reasoning. I apply …
Generalizing conditional average treatment effects from nested randomized trials to all trial-eligible individuals
University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health（哈佛大学陈曾熙公共卫生学院）；Brown University School of Public Health（布朗大学公共卫生学院）；Center for Gerontology & Healthcare Research, Brown University School of Public Health（布朗大学公共卫生学院老年学与医疗保健研究中心）
In randomized controlled trials (RCTs), treatment is often assigned by stratified randomization. I show that among all stratified randomization schemes which treat all units with probability one half, a certain matched-pair design achieves the maximum statistical precision for estimating the average treatment effect (ATE). In an important special case, the optimal design pairs units according to the baseline outcome. In a simulation study based on datasets from 10 RCTs, this design lowers the standard error for the estimator of the ATE by 10% on average, and by up to 34%, relative to the origi…
A randomized trial and an analysis of observational data designed to emulate the trial sample observations separately, but have the same eligibility criteria, collect information on some shared baseline covariates, and compare the effects of the same treatments on the same outcomes. Treatment effect estimates from the trial and its emulation can be compared to benchmark observational analysis methods. In a simplified setting with complete adherence to the assigned treatment strategy and no loss-to-follow-up, we show that benchmarking relies on an exchangeability condition between the populatio…
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) provide strong internal validity compared with observational studies. However, selection bias threatens the external validity of randomized trials. Thus, RCT results may not apply to either broad public policy populations or narrow populations, such as specific insurance pools. Some researchers use propensity scores (PSs) to generalize results from an RCT to a target population. In this scenario, a PS is defined as the probability of participating in the trial conditioning on observed covariates. We study a model-free inverse probability weighted estimator (…
Randomized controlled trials are not only the golden standard in medicine and vaccine trials but have spread to many other disciplines like behavioral economics, making it an important interdisciplinary tool for scientists. When designing randomized controlled trials, how to assign participants to treatments becomes a key issue. In particular in the presence of covariate factors, the assignment can significantly influence statistical properties and thereby the quality of the trial. Another key issue is the widely popular assumption among experimenters that participants do not influence each ot…
Randomized trials are considered the gold standard for estimating causal effects. Trial findings are often used to inform policy and programming efforts, yet their results may not generalize well to a relevant target population due to potential differences in effect moderators between the trial and population. Statistical methods have been developed to improve generalizability by combining trials and population data, and weighting the trial to resemble the population on baseline covariates.Large-scale surveys in fields such as health and education with complex survey designs are a logical sour…
Randomized trials typically estimate average relative treatment effects, but decisions on the benefit of a treatment are possibly better informed by more individualized predictions of the absolute treatment effect. In case of a binary outcome, these predictions of absolute individualized treatment effect require knowledge of the individual's risk without treatment and incorporation of a possibly differential treatment effect (i.e. varying with patient characteristics). In this paper we lay out the causal structure of individualized treatment effect in terms of potential outcomes and describe t…
Cluster randomized trials (CRTs) are popular in public health and in the social sciences to evaluate a new treatment or policy where the new policy is randomly allocated to clusters of units rather than individual units. CRTs often feature both noncompliance, when individuals within a cluster are not exposed to the intervention, and individuals within a cluster may influence each other through treatment spillovers where those who comply with the new policy may affect the outcomes of those who do not. Here, we study the identification of causal effects in CRTs when both noncompliance and treatm…
