BST 290 Seminar: Caleb Miles

Tuesday, February 23, 4:10pm, MSB 1147 (Colloquium Room)

Refreshments at 3:30pm in MSB 4110 (Statistics Lounge)

Speaker:          Caleb Miles (Postdoctoral Fellow, Group in Biostatistics, UC Berkeley)

Title:                “A class if semiparametric tests of treatment effect robust to measurement error of a confounder.”

Abstract:          When assessing the presence of an exposure causal effect on a given outcome, it is well known that classical measurement error of the exposure can seriously reduce the power of a test of the null hypothesis in question, although its type I error rate will generally remain controlled at the nominal level. In contrast, classical measurement error of a confounder can have disastrous consequences on the type I error rate of a test of treatment effect. In this paper, we develop a large class of semiparametric test statistics of an exposure causal effect, which are completely robust to classical measurement error of a subset of confounders. A unique and appealing feature of our proposed methods is that they require no external information such as validation data or replicates of error-prone confounders. We present a doubly-robust form of this test that requires only one of two models to be correctly specified for the resulting test statistic to have correct type I error rate. We demonstrate validity and power within our class of test statistics through simulation studies. We apply the methods to a multi-U.S.-city, time-series data set to test for an effect of temperature on mortality while adjusting for atmospheric particulate matter with diameter of 2.5 micrometres or less (PM2.5), which is well known to be measured with error.