主 题: Estimating the Causal Effect of Flu Shot for Influenza in an Encouragement Design Study
报告人: Prof. Xiao-Hua Zhou (University of Washington)
时 间: 2005-06-29 下午 2:00 - 3:00
地 点: 理科一号楼 1364 
  
 A traditional randomized clinical trial is the established gold 
  
standard for estimating the causal effects of treatments. However, 
  
for some treatments, it is impossible to perform such a randomized 
  
trial due to ethical and other reasons. For example, in our flu shot 
  
 reminder study, it would be unethical to randomize high-risk adult 
  
patients to receive or not to receive 
  
flu shots  in order to evaluate  causal effects of having flu on 
  
patient outcomes. A better way to learn about the treatment causal 
  
effects is to perform a randomized encouragement design study (EDS). 
  
A randomized EDS randomly assigns subjects to receive or not to 
  
receive an encouragement for the use of a treatment. In recent 
  
years, there has been a rapid growth in utilizing encouragement 
  
designs to study causal treatment effects. Since the randomization 
  
to encouragement leads to a natural instrumental variable under some 
  
plausible assumptions, the randomized EDS provides a tool for 
  
estimating causal effects of the treatment on patient outcomes. 
   
   
  
In this talk, we focus our attention on estimating causal effects on 
  
binary outcomes and generalize the moment method proposed in Frangakis 
  
and Rubin (1999) to a randomized clinical trial with crossover 
  
non-compliance and missing data, as in our flu shot reminder study. 
  
We also develop a maximum likelihood (ML) approach for this type