BSU Seminar: “How to obtain valid tests and confidence intervals for treatment effects after confounder selection”

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Dr Oliver Dukes, Ghent University
• Tuesday 22 January 2019, 14:00-15:00
• Large Seminar Room, 1st Floor, Institute of Public Health, University Forvie Site, Robinson Way, Cambridge.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Alison Quenault.

The problem of how to best select variables for confounding adjustment forms one of the key challenges in the evaluation of exposure or treatment effects in observational studies. Routine practice is often based on stepwise selection procedures that use hypothesis testing, change-in-estimate assessments or the lasso, which have all been criticised for not giving sufficient priority to the selection of confounders. This has prompted vigorous recent activity in developing procedures that prioritise the selection of confounders, while preventing the selection of so-called instrumental variables that are associated with exposure but not outcome (after adjustment for the exposure). A major drawback of all these procedures is that there is no finite sample size at which they are guaranteed to deliver treatment effect estimators and associated confidence intervals with adequate performance. This is the result of the estimator jumping back and forth between different selected models, and standard confidence intervals ignoring the resulting model selection uncertainty.

In this talk, I will develop insight into this by evaluating the finite-sample distribution of the exposure effect estimator in linear regression, under a number of the aforementioned confounder selection procedures. I will then propose a simple and generic solution in the context of generalised linear models, which overcomes this concern (under weaker conditions than competing proposals).

This talk is part of the MRC Biostatistics Unit Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• BHRU Annual Lecture 2015
• BHRU Annual Lecture 2016
• Biology
• Cambridge Centre for Data-Driven Discovery (C2D3)
• Cambridge Immunology
• Cambridge talks
• Cardiovascular Epidemiology Unit Special Seminars
• Chris Davis' list
• Department of Public Health and Primary Care
• Graduate-Seminars
• Interested Talks
• Large Seminar Room, 1st Floor, Institute of Public Health, University Forvie Site, Robinson Way, Cambridge
• Life Sciences
• Life Sciences
• ME Seminar
• MRC Biostatistics Unit Seminars
• Primary Care
• PublicHealth@Cambridge
• Trust & Technology Initiative - interesting events
• bld31
• my_list
• ndk22's list
• ob366-ai4er
• other talks
• primary care
• rp587

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.