文章基本信息

标题：simcausal R Package: Conducting Transparent and Reproducible Simulation Studies of Causal Effect Estimation with Complex Longitudinal Data
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作者：Oleg Sofrygin ; Mark J. van der Laan ; Romain Neugebauer 等
期刊名称：Journal of Statistical Software
印刷版ISSN：1548-7660
电子版ISSN：1548-7660
出版年度：2017
卷号：81
期号：1
页码：1-47
DOI：10.18637/jss.v081.i02
语种：English
出版社：University of California, Los Angeles
摘要：The simcausal R package is a tool for specification and simulation of complex longitudinal data structures that are based on non-parametric structural equation models. The package aims to provide a flexible tool for simplifying the conduct of transparent and reproducible simulation studies, with a particular emphasis on the types of data and interventions frequently encountered in real-world causal inference problems, such as, observational data with time-dependent confounding, selection bias, and random monitoring processes. The package interface allows for concise expression of complex functional dependencies between a large number of nodes, where each node may represent a measurement at a specific time point. The package allows for specification and simulation of counterfactual data under various user-specified interventions (e.g., static, dynamic, deterministic, or stochastic). In particular, the interventions may represent exposures to treatment regimens, the occurrence or non-occurrence of right-censoring events, or of clinical monitoring events. Finally, the package enables the computation of a selected set of user-specified features of the distribution of the counterfactual data that represent common causal quantities of interest, such as, treatment-specific means, the average treatment effects and coefficients from working marginal structural models. The applicability of simcausal is demonstrated by replicating the results of two published simulation studies.
关键词：causal inference;simulation;marginal structural model;structural equation model;directed acyclic graph;causal model;R