Combining machine learning and propensity score weighting to estimate causal effects in multivalued treatments.

Journal: Journal of evaluation in clinical practice
Published Date:

Abstract

RATIONALE, AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: Interventions with multivalued treatments are common in medical and health research; examples include comparing the efficacy of competing interventions and contrasting various doses of a drug. In recent years, there has been growing interest in the development of methods that estimate multivalued treatment effects using observational data. This paper extends a previously described analytic framework for evaluating binary treatments to studies involving multivalued treatments utilizing a machine learning algorithm called optimal discriminant analysis (ODA).

Authors

  • Ariel Linden
    Linden Consulting Group, LLC, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
  • Paul R Yarnold
    Optimal Data Analysis, LLC, Chicago, IL, USA.