Abstract
Standard statistical methods to study causality define a set of treatment-specific counterfactual outcomes as the outcomes observed in a hypothetical world in which a given treatment strategy is applied to all individuals. For example, if treatment has two possible values, one may define the causal effect as a comparison between the expectation of the counterfactual outcomes under regimes that assign each treatment level with probability one. Regimes of this type are often referred to as static. Another interesting type of regimes assign an individual’s treatment level as a function of the individual’s measured history. Regimes like this have been called dynamic, since they can vary according to observed pre-treatment characteristics of the individual. Static and dynamic regimes have often been called deterministic, because they are completely determined by variables measured before treatment.
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Díaz, I., van der Laan, M.J. (2018). Stochastic Treatment Regimes. In: Targeted Learning in Data Science. Springer Series in Statistics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65304-4_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65304-4_14
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