scholarly journals On the Relationship between ANOVA Main Effects and Average Treatment Effects

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Graefe ◽  
Sonja Hahn ◽  
Axel Mayer

In unbalanced designs, there is a controversy about which ANOVA type of sums of squares should be used for testing main effects and whether main effects should be considered at all in the presence of interactions. Looking at this problem from a causal inference perspective, we show in which designs and under which conditions the ANOVA main effects correspond to average treatment effects as defined in the causal inference literature. We consider balanced, proportional and nonorthogonal designs, and models with and without interactions. In balanced designs, main effects obtained by type I, II, and III sums of squares all correspond to the average treatment effect. This is also true for proportional designs except for ANOVA type III which leads to bias if there are interactions. In nonorthogonal designs, ANOVA type I is always highly biased and ANOVA type II and III are biased if there are interactions. In a simulation study, we confirm our theoretical results and examine the severity of bias under different conditions.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mateus C. R. Neves ◽  
Felipe De Figueiredo Silva ◽  
Carlos Otávio Freitas

In this paper we estimate the average treatment effect from access to extension services and credit on agricultural production in selected Andean countries (Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia). More specifically, we want to identify the effect of accessibility, here represented as travel time to the nearest area with 1,500 or more inhabitants per square kilometer or at least 50,000 inhabitants, on the likelihood of accessing extension and credit. To estimate the treatment effect and identify the effect of accessibility on these variables, we use data from the Colombian and Bolivian Agricultural Censuses of 2013 and 2014, respectively; a national agricultural survey from 2017 for Peru; and geographic information on travel time. We find that the average treatment effect for extension is higher compared to that of credit for farms in Bolivia and Peru, and lower for Colombia. The average treatment effects of extension and credit for Peruvian farms are $2,387.45 and $3,583.42 respectively. The average treatment effect for extension and credit are $941.92 and $668.69, respectively, while in Colombia are $1,365.98 and $1,192.51, respectively. We also find that accessibility and the likelihood of accessing these services are nonlinearly related. Results indicate that higher likelihood is associated with lower travel time, especially in the analysis of credit.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-271
Author(s):  
Nathan Corder ◽  
Shu Yang

Abstract The problem of missingness in observational data is ubiquitous. When the confounders are missing at random, multiple imputation is commonly used; however, the method requires congeniality conditions for valid inferences, which may not be satisfied when estimating average causal treatment effects. Alternatively, fractional imputation, proposed by Kim 2011, has been implemented to handling missing values in regression context. In this article, we develop fractional imputation methods for estimating the average treatment effects with confounders missing at random. We show that the fractional imputation estimator of the average treatment effect is asymptotically normal, which permits a consistent variance estimate. Via simulation study, we compare fractional imputation’s accuracy and precision with that of multiple imputation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (49) ◽  
pp. 12441-12446 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Coppock ◽  
Thomas J. Leeper ◽  
Kevin J. Mullinix

The extent to which survey experiments conducted with nonrepresentative convenience samples are generalizable to target populations depends critically on the degree of treatment effect heterogeneity. Recent inquiries have found a strong correspondence between sample average treatment effects estimated in nationally representative experiments and in replication studies conducted with convenience samples. We consider here two possible explanations: low levels of effect heterogeneity or high levels of effect heterogeneity that are unrelated to selection into the convenience sample. We analyze subgroup conditional average treatment effects using 27 original–replication study pairs (encompassing 101,745 individual survey responses) to assess the extent to which subgroup effect estimates generalize. While there are exceptions, the overwhelming pattern that emerges is one of treatment effect homogeneity, providing a partial explanation for strong correspondence across both unconditional and conditional average treatment effect estimates.


Healthcare ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorraine Johnson ◽  
Mira Shapiro ◽  
Jennifer Mankoff

Lyme disease is caused by the bacteria borrelia burgdorferi and is spread primarily through the bite of a tick. There is considerable uncertainty in the medical community regarding the best approach to treating patients with Lyme disease who do not respond fully to short-term antibiotic therapy. These patients have persistent Lyme disease symptoms resulting from lack of treatment, under-treatment, or lack of response to their antibiotic treatment protocol. In the past, treatment trials have used small restrictive samples and relied on average treatment effects as their measure of success and produced conflicting results. To provide individualized care, clinicians need information that reflects their patient population. Today, we have the ability to analyze large data bases, including patient registries, that reflect the broader range of patients more typically seen in clinical practice. This allows us to examine treatment variation within the sample and identify groups of patients that are most responsive to treatment. Using patient-reported outcome data from the MyLymeData online patient registry, we show that sub-group analysis techniques can unmask valuable information that is hidden if averages alone are used. In our analysis, this approach revealed treatment effectiveness for up to a third of patients with Lyme disease. This study is important because it can help open the door to more individualized patient care using patient-centered outcomes and real-world evidence.


2017 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 2567-2590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeanette W. Chung ◽  
Karl Y. Bilimoria ◽  
Jonah J. Stulberg ◽  
Christopher M. Quinn ◽  
Larry V. Hedges

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (05) ◽  
pp. 2050005
Author(s):  
Lev V. Utkin ◽  
Mikhail V. Kots ◽  
Viacheslav S. Chukanov ◽  
Andrei V. Konstantinov ◽  
Anna A. Meldo

A new meta-algorithm for estimating the conditional average treatment effects is pro-posed in the paper. The basic idea behind the algorithm is to consider a new dataset consisting of feature vectors produced by means of concatenation of examples from control and treatment groups, which are close to each other. Outcomes of new data are defined as the difference between outcomes of the corresponding examples comprising new feature vectors. The second idea is based on the assumption that the number of controls is rather large and the control outcome function is precisely determined. This assumption allows us to augment treatments by generating feature vectors which are closed to available treatments. The outcome regression function constructed on the augmented set of concatenated feature vectors can be viewed as an estimator of the conditional average treatment effects. A simple modification of the Co-learner based on the random subspace method or the feature bagging is also proposed. Various numerical simulation experiments illustrate the proposed algorithm and show its outperformance in comparison with the well-known T-learner and X-learner for several types of the control and treatment outcome functions.


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