Tchetgen Tchetgen Eric J, Fulcher Isabel R, Shpitser Ilya
Department of Statistics, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.
Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA.
J Am Stat Assoc. 2021;116(534):833-844. doi: 10.1080/01621459.2020.1811098. Epub 2020 Oct 1.
Methods for inferring average causal effects have traditionally relied on two key assumptions: (i) the intervention received by one unit cannot causally influence the outcome of another; and (ii) units can be organized into nonoverlapping groups such that outcomes of units in separate groups are independent. In this article, we develop new statistical methods for causal inference based on a single realization of a network of connected units for which neither assumption (i) nor (ii) holds. The proposed approach allows both for arbitrary forms of interference, whereby the outcome of a unit may depend on interventions received by other units with whom a network path through connected units exists; and long range dependence, whereby outcomes for any two units likewise connected by a path in the network may be dependent. Under network versions of consistency and no unobserved confounding, inference is made tractable by an assumption that the networks outcome, treatment and covariate vectors are a single realization of a certain chain graph model. This assumption allows inferences about various network causal effects via the , a network generalization of Robins' well-known g-computation algorithm previously described for causal inference under assumptions (i) and (ii). Supplementary materials for this article are available online.
传统上,推断平均因果效应的方法依赖于两个关键假设:(i)一个单元接受的干预不会对另一个单元的结果产生因果影响;(ii)单元可以被组织成不重叠的组,使得不同组中单元的结果是独立的。在本文中,我们基于连接单元网络的单个实现,开发了用于因果推断的新统计方法,其中假设(i)和(ii)均不成立。所提出的方法既允许任意形式的干扰,即一个单元的结果可能取决于通过连接单元与该单元存在网络路径的其他单元所接受的干预;也允许长程依赖,即通过网络中的路径同样相连的任意两个单元的结果可能是相关的。在一致性和无未观察到的混杂因素的网络版本下,通过假设网络结果、处理和协变量向量是某个链图模型的单个实现,使得推断变得易于处理。这个假设允许通过 (一种网络推广的罗宾斯著名的g - 计算算法,该算法先前在假设(i)和(ii)下用于因果推断)来推断各种网络因果效应。本文的补充材料可在线获取。