A confounding bridge approach for double negative control inference on causal effects

By Wang Miao, Xu Shi, Yilin Li, E. T. Tchetgen Tchetgen. Statistical Theory and Related Fields, 2018

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Unmeasured confounding is a key challenge for causal inference. In this paper, we establish a framework for unmeasured confounding adjustment with negative control variables. A negative control outcome is associated with the confounder but not causally affected by the exposure in view, and a negative control exposure is correlated with the primary exposure or the confounder but does not causally affect the outcome of interest. We introduce an outcome confounding bridge function that depicts the relationship between the confounding effects on the primary outcome and the negative control outcome, and we incorporate a negative control exposure to identify the bridge function and the average causal effect. We also consider the extension to the positive control setting by allowing for the nonzero causal effect of the primary exposure on the control outcome. We illustrate our approach with simulations and apply it to a study about the short-term effect of air pollution on mortality. Although a standard analysis shows a significant acute effect of PM2.5 on mortality, our analysis indicates that this effect may be confounded, and after double negative control adjustment, the effect is attenuated toward zero.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/113de082a2afe390dbc3fa23ca4f19e640e7930b

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Citations in the corpus

Long-term Causal Inference Under Persistent Confounding via Data Combination (2022, background): “Moreover, the characterization for outcome bridge function h0 given in Equation (10) has an analogue in Miao and Tchetgen [2018]. Nevertheless, our setting is substantially different from the existing proximal causal inference literature. The short-term outcomes (S1, S3) are both affected by the tre”