Department of Statistics, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC.
Department of Statistical and Actuarial Sciences, Department of Computer Science, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.
PLoS One. 2024 Sep 30;19(9):e0296951. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0296951. eCollection 2024.
In causal inference, the estimation of the average treatment effect is often of interest. For example, in cancer research, an interesting question is to assess the effects of the chemotherapy treatment on cancer, with the information of gene expressions taken into account. Two crucial challenges in this analysis involve addressing measurement error in gene expressions and handling noninformative gene expressions. While analytical methods have been developed to address those challenges, no user-friendly computational software packages seem to be available to implement those methods. To close this gap, we develop an R package, called AteMeVs, to estimate the average treatment effect using the inverse-probability-weighting estimation method to handle data with both measurement error and spurious variables. This developed package accommodates the method proposed by Yi and Chen (2023) as a special case, and further extends its application to a broader scope. The usage of the developed R package is illustrated by applying it to analyze a cancer dataset with information of gene expressions.
在因果推断中,平均处理效应的估计通常是人们感兴趣的。例如,在癌症研究中,一个有趣的问题是评估化疗治疗对癌症的影响,同时考虑基因表达的信息。在这种分析中,两个关键的挑战涉及到处理基因表达的测量误差和处理无信息的基因表达。虽然已经开发了分析方法来解决这些挑战,但似乎没有用户友好的计算软件包可以实现这些方法。为了弥补这一差距,我们开发了一个名为 AteMeVs 的 R 包,使用逆概率加权估计方法来估计平均处理效应,以处理同时存在测量误差和虚假变量的数据。这个开发的包包含了 Yi 和 Chen(2023)提出的方法作为一个特例,并进一步将其应用扩展到更广泛的范围。通过将开发的 R 包应用于分析具有基因表达信息的癌症数据集来说明其用法。