Using Big Data to Emulate a Target Trial When a Randomized Trial Is Not Available.

By Miguel A. Hern'an, James M. Robins. American Journal of Epidemiology, 2016

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Specifying a target trial prevents immortal time bias and other self-inflicted injuries in observational analyses (2016, background): “Many analyses of observational data are attempts to emulate a hypothetical pragmatic randomized trial, which we refer to as the target trial [1].”
ROBINS-I: a tool for assessing risk of bias in non-randomised studies of interventions (2016, background): “11 12 Such a “target” trial need not be feasible or ethical: for example, it could compare individuals who were and were not assigned to start smoking.”
Causal machine learning for predicting treatment outcomes (2024, neutral): “The assumption is also called ignorability.”
Axes of a revolution: challenges and promises of big data in healthcare (2020, background): “Although proper study design and use of appropriate methods tailored to the use of observational data for causal analysis 81–84 may alleviate some of these issues, this remains an important open problem.”