Estimating the effect of treatment on binary outcomes using full matching on the propensity score
Estimating the effect of treatment on binary outcomes using full matching on the propensity score
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DOI：
10.1177/0962280215601134
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发表时间：
2017-12-01
影响因子：
2.3
通讯作者：
Stuart, Elizabeth A.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Austin, Peter C.;Stuart, Elizabeth A.
许多非实验研究使用倾向评分方法，通过在一组观察到的基线协变量上平衡治疗组和对照组来估计因果效应。倾向性评分的完全匹配已经成为一种特别有效和灵活的方法，可以利用所有可用的数据，并创建平衡的治疗和对照组。然而，完全匹配很少用于二进制结果，并且在估计对二进制结果的影响时，研究完全匹配性能的工作相对较少。本文描述了当使用完全匹配时，可用于估计治疗对二元结果的影响的方法。然后使用蒙特卡罗模拟来评估基于完全匹配（有和没有卡钳）的这些方法的性能，并将它们的性能与最近邻匹配（有和没有卡钳）和处理权重的逆概率进行比较。模拟改变了治疗的流行程度和协变量与治疗分配之间的关联强度。结果表明，在混杂强度较弱的情况下，所有方法都能取得较好的效果。由于混淆程度较强，方法的相对性能各不相同，与卡尺匹配的最近邻匹配在广泛的设置范围内始终显示出良好的性能。我们使用一项研究来说明这些方法，该研究估计了住院患者戒烟咨询对心脏病发作住院后生存的影响。
Many non-experimental studies use propensity-score methods to estimate causal effects by balancing treatment and control groups on a set of observed baseline covariates. Full matching on the propensity score has emerged as a particularly effective and flexible method for utilizing all available data, and creating well-balanced treatment and comparison groups. However, full matching has been used infrequently with binary outcomes, and relatively little work has investigated the performance of full matching when estimating effects on binary outcomes. This paper describes methods that can be used for estimating the effect of treatment on binary outcomes when using full matching. It then used Monte Carlo simulations to evaluate the performance of these methods based on full matching (with and without a caliper), and compared their performance with that of nearest neighbour matching (with and without a caliper) and inverse probability of treatment weighting. The simulations varied the prevalence of the treatment and the strength of association between the covariates and treatment assignment. Results indicated that all of the approaches work well when the strength of confounding is relatively weak. With stronger confounding, the relative performance of the methods varies, with nearest neighbour matching with a caliper showing consistently good performance across a wide range of settings. We illustrate the approaches using a study estimating the effect of inpatient smoking cessation counselling on survival following hospitalization for a heart attack.