2022/02/04 by Kjetil Røysland, Røysland, Kjetil, Pål Ryalen +5 · 1 voice · 2 citations
Mathematics · #62Dxx (Primary) 62Nxx (Secondary) #Advanced Causal Inference Techniques #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Methodology (stat.ME) #Statistical Methods and Bayesian Inference #Statistical Methods and Inference
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2202.02311
openalex publication_date 2022/02/04 · openalex created_date 2022/04/03 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We consider continuous-time survival or more general event-history settings, where the aim is to infer the causal effect of a time-dependent treatment process. This is formalised as the effect on the outcome event of a (possibly hypothetical) intervention on the intensity of the treatment process, i.e. a stochastic intervention. To establish whether valid inference about the interventional situation can be drawn from typical observational, i.e. non-experimental, data we propose graphical rules indicating whether the observed information is sufficient to identify the desired causal effect by suitable re-weighting. In analogy to the well-known causal directed acyclic graphs, the corresponding dynamic graphs combine causal semantics with local independence models for multivariate counting processes. Importantly, we highlight that causal inference from censored data requires structural assumptions on the censoring process beyond the usual independent censoring assumption, which can be represented and verified graphically. Our results establish general non-parametric identifiability and do not rely on particular survival models. We illustrate our proposal with a data example on HPV-testing for cervical cancer screening, where the desired effect is estimated by re-weighted cumulative incidence curves.