[Forum SIS] Seminar Mealli @Bocconi

[Giacomo Zanella]

We announce the following DEC Statistics seminar:

Thursday, October 10
12:30 Meeting room 3-e4-sr03,
Bocconi University, Via Roentgen 1, 3rd floor

Fabrizia Mealli (University of Florence)

Title: Assessing causal effects in the presence of treatment switching through principal stratification

Abstract: consider clinical trials focusing on survival outcomes for patients suffering from Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS)-related illnesses or particularly painful cancers in advanced stages. These trials often allow patients in the control arm to switch to the treatment arm if their physical conditions are worse than certain tolerance levels. The Intention-To-Treat analysis compares groups formed by randomization regardless of the treatment actually received. Although it provides valid causal estimates of the effect of assignment, it does not measure the effect of the actual receipt of the treatment and ignores the information of treatment switching in the control group. Other existing methods propose to reconstruct the outcome a unit would have had if s/he had not switched. But these methods usually rely on strong assumptions, for example, there exists no relation between patient's prognosis and switching behavior, or the treatment effect is constant. Clearly, the switching status of the units in the control group contains important post-treatment information, which is useful to characterize the treatment effect heterogeneity. We propose to re-define the problem of treatment switching using principal stratification and introduce new causal estimands, principal causal effects for patients belonging to subpopulations defined by the switching behavior under control. For statistical inference, we use a Bayesian approach to take into account that (i) switching happens in continuous time generating infinitely many principal strata; (ii) switching time is not defined for units who never switch in a particular experiment; and (iii) survival time and switching time are subject to censoring. We illustrate our framework using a synthetic dataset based on the Concorde study, a randomized controlled trial aimed to assess causal effects on time to-disease progression or death of immediate versus deferred treatment with zidovudine among patients with asymptomatic HIV infection.

Joint work with Alessandra Mattei and Peng Ding



Kind regards,
Giacomo Zanella


The DEC statistics seminars schedule is available at http://www.unibocconi.eu/statseminar

Please note: if you are a guest and you do not have a Bocconi ID Card to access to the Bocconi Buildings, please communicate your participation by sending an email to arianna.colombo a unibocconi.it
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