4.4 Article

Quasi-rerandomization for observational studies

Journal

BMC MEDICAL RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Volume 23, Issue 1, Pages -

Publisher

BMC
DOI: 10.1186/s12874-023-01977-7

Keywords

Causal inference; Covariate balance; Observational data; Rerandomization; Treatment effect

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This article proposes a method called quasi-rerandomization, which improves covariate balance by rerandomizing observational covariates, thus approximating randomized experiments. Through extensive numerical studies, the method demonstrates competitive performance in terms of improving covariate balance and precision of treatment effect estimation.
Background In the causal analysis of observational studies, covariates should be carefully balanced to approximate a randomized experiment. Numerous covariate balancing methods have been proposed for this purpose. However, it is often unclear what type of randomized experiments the balancing approaches aim to approximate; and this may cause ambiguity and hamper the synthesis of balancing characteristics within randomized experiments.Methods Randomized experiments based on rerandomization, known for significant improvement on covariate balance, have recently gained attention in the literature, but no attempt has been made to integrate this scheme into observational studies for improving covariate balance. Motivated by the above concerns, we propose quasi-rerandomization, a novel reweighting method, where observational covariates are rerandomized to be the anchor for reweighting such that the balanced covariates obtained from rerandomization can be reconstructed by the weighted data.Results Through extensive numerical studies, not only does our approach demonstrate similar covariate balance and comparable estimation precision of treatment effect to rerandomization in many situations, but it also exhibits advantages over other balancing techniques in inferring the treatment effect.Conclusion Our quasi-rerandomization method can approximate the rerandomized experiments well in terms of improving the covariate balance and the precision of treatment effect estimation. Furthermore, our approach shows competitive performance compared with other weighting and matching methods. The codes for the numerical stud-ies are available at https:// github. com/ BobZh angHT/ QReR.

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