Liu Lan, Hudgens Michael G
Department of Biostatistics, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599.
J Am Stat Assoc. 2014 Jan 1;109(505):288-301. doi: 10.1080/01621459.2013.844698.
Recently, increasing attention has focused on making causal inference when interference is possible. In the presence of interference, treatment may have several types of effects. In this paper, we consider inference about such effects when the population consists of groups of individuals where interference is possible within groups but not between groups. A two stage randomization design is assumed where in the first stage groups are randomized to different treatment allocation strategies and in the second stage individuals are randomized to treatment or control conditional on the strategy assigned to their group in the first stage. For this design, the asymptotic distributions of estimators of the causal effects are derived when either the number of individuals per group or the number of groups grows large. Under certain homogeneity assumptions, the asymptotic distributions provide justification for Wald-type confidence intervals (CIs) and tests. Empirical results demonstrate the Wald CIs have good coverage in finite samples and are narrower than CIs based on either the Chebyshev or Hoeffding inequalities provided the number of groups is not too small. The methods are illustrated by two examples which consider the effects of cholera vaccination and an intervention to encourage voting.
最近,当可能存在干扰时,越来越多的关注集中在进行因果推断上。在存在干扰的情况下,治疗可能有几种类型的效果。在本文中,当总体由个体组组成,且组内可能存在干扰而组间不存在干扰时,我们考虑对这类效果进行推断。假设采用两阶段随机化设计,在第一阶段,组被随机分配到不同的治疗分配策略,在第二阶段,个体根据其组在第一阶段分配的策略被随机分配到治疗组或对照组。对于这种设计,当每组个体数量或组数变大时,推导了因果效应估计量的渐近分布。在某些同质性假设下,渐近分布为 Wald 型置信区间(CIs)和检验提供了依据。实证结果表明,Wald 置信区间在有限样本中具有良好的覆盖率,并且在组数不太小的情况下,比基于切比雪夫不等式或 Hoeffding 不等式的置信区间更窄。通过两个例子说明了这些方法,这两个例子分别考虑了霍乱疫苗接种的效果和一项鼓励投票的干预措施。