Variance reduction in the inverse probability weighted estimators for the average treatment effect using the propensity score

Jiangang Liao, Charles Rohde

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

The propensity methodology is widely used in medical research to compare different treatments in designs with a nonrandomized treatment allocation. The inverse probability weighted (IPW) estimators are a primary tool for estimating the average treatment effect but the large variance of these estimators is often a significant concern for their reliable use in practice. Inspired by Rao-Blackwellization, this paper proposes a method to smooth an IPW estimator by replacing the weights in the original estimator by their mean over a distribution of the potential treatment assignment. In our simulation study, the smoothed IPW estimator achieves a substantial variance reduction over its original version with only a small increased bias, for example two-to-sevenfold variance reduction for the three IPW estimators in Lunceford and Davidian [Statistics in Medicine, 23(19), 2937–2960]. In addition, our proposed smoothing can also be applied to the locally efficient and doubly robust estimator for added protection against model misspecification. An implementation in R is provided.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)660-667
Number of pages8
JournalBiometrics
Volume78
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2022

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Statistics and Probability
  • General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
  • General Immunology and Microbiology
  • General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
  • Applied Mathematics

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Variance reduction in the inverse probability weighted estimators for the average treatment effect using the propensity score'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this