Statistics in medicine
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Statistics in medicine · Oct 2014
The use of bootstrapping when using propensity-score matching without replacement: a simulation study.
Propensity-score matching is frequently used to estimate the effect of treatments, exposures, and interventions when using observational data. An important issue when using propensity-score matching is how to estimate the standard error of the estimated treatment effect. Accurate variance estimation permits construction of confidence intervals that have the advertised coverage rates and tests of statistical significance that have the correct type I error rates. ⋯ The first method involved drawing bootstrap samples from the matched pairs in the propensity-score-matched sample. The second method involved drawing bootstrap samples from the original sample and estimating the propensity score separately in each bootstrap sample and creating a matched sample within each of these bootstrap samples. The former approach was found to result in estimates of the standard error that were closer to the empirical standard deviation of the sampling distribution of estimated effects.
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Propensity scores are widely adopted in observational research because they enable adjustment for high-dimensional confounders without requiring models for their association with the outcome of interest. The results of statistical analyses based on stratification, matching or inverse weighting by the propensity score are therefore less susceptible to model extrapolation than those based solely on outcome regression models. This is attractive because extrapolation in outcome regression models may be alarming, yet difficult to diagnose, when the exposed and unexposed individuals have very different covariate distributions. ⋯ In this article, we develop novel insights into the properties of this adjustment method. We demonstrate that standard tests of the null hypothesis of no exposure effect (based on robust variance estimators), as well as particular standardised effects obtained from such adjusted regression models, are robust against misspecification of the outcome model when a propensity score model is correctly specified; they are thus not vulnerable to the aforementioned problem of extrapolation. We moreover propose efficient estimators for these standardised effects, which retain a useful causal interpretation even when the propensity score model is misspecified, provided the outcome regression model is correctly specified.