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Federated Causal Inference in Heterogeneous Observational Data

Ruoxuan Xiong, Allison Koenecke, Michael Powell, Zhu Shen, Joshua T. Vogelstein, Susan Athey

arXiv 25 Jul 2021 · Machine Learning · publishedStatistics in Medicine (2023) · 31 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:2107.11732 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

We are interested in estimating the effect of a treatment applied to individuals at multiple sites, where data is stored locally for each site. Due to privacy constraints, individual-level data cannot be shared across sites; the sites may also have heterogeneous populations and treatment assignment mechanisms. Motivated by these considerations, we develop federated methods to draw inference on the average treatment effects of combined data across sites. Our methods first compute summary statistics locally using propensity scores and then aggregate these statistics across sites to obtain point and variance estimators of average treatment effects. We show that these estimators are consistent and asymptotically normal. To achieve these asymptotic properties, we find that the aggregation schemes need to account for the heterogeneity in treatment assignments and in outcomes across sites. We demonstrate the validity of our federated methods through a comparative study of two large medical claims databases.

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Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Koenecke, A., Powell, M., Xiong, R., Shen, Z., Fischer, N., Huq, S.,… (2021) Alpha-1 adrenergic receptor antagonists to prevent hyperinflammation and death from lower respiratory tract infection self0.9568388%
2Wooldridge, J. M (2007) Inverse probability weighted estimation for general missing data problems0.8947471%
3Han, L., Hou, J., Cho, K., Duan, R., and Cai, T (2021) Federated adaptive causal estimation (face) of target treatment effects0.81142100%
4White, H (1982) Maximum likelihood estimation of misspecified models0.7374350%
5Wooldridge, J. M (2002) Inverse probability weighted m-estimators for sample selection, attrition, and stratification0.73732100%
6Duan, R., Boland, M. R., Liu, Z., Liu, Y., Chang, H. H., Xu, H., Chu… (2020) Learning from electronic health records across multiple sites: A communication-efficient and privacy-preserving distributed algo…0.64422100%
7Duan, R., Ning, Y., and Chen, Y (2022) Heterogeneity-aware and communication-efficient distributed statistical inference0.64422100%
8Jordan, M. I., Lee, J. D., and Yang, Y (2018) Communication-efficient distributed statistical inference0.64422100%
9Han, L., Li, Y., Niknam, B. A., and Zubizarreta, J. R (2022) Privacy-preserving and communication-efficient causal inference for hospital quality measurement0.58531100%
10Chernozhukov, V., Chetverikov, D., Demirer, M., Duflo, E., Hansen, C… (2017) Double/debiased/neyman machine learning of treatment effects0.5112250%

Showing the top 10 of 60 scored citations.

Cited by, within the corpus

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Citing paperIntensityMentionsSections
1Difference-in-Differences with Unpoolable Data0.64422
2Feature Selection for Personalized Policy Analysis0.40511
3Federated Offline Policy Learning0.40511
4Cross-Validated Causal Inference: a Modern Method to Combine Experimental and Observational Data0.40511